A heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometrics databases for large-scale research assessments

  • Authors:

  • Ciriaco Andrea D'Angelo;Cristiano Giuffrida;Giovanni Abramo

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer at University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Rome, Italy;Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1081A, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands;National Research Council of Italy and Laboratory for Studies of Research and Technology Transfer at University of Rome “Tor Vergata,” Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Impresa, Univer ...

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

National exercises for the evaluation of research activity by universities are becoming regular practice in ever more countries. These exercises have mainly been conducted through the application of peer-review methods. Bibliometrics has not been able to offer a valid large-scale alternative because of almost overwhelming difficulties in identifying the true author of each publication. We will address this problem by presenting a heuristic approach to author name disambiguation in bibliometric datasets for large-scale research assessments. The application proposed concerns the Italian university system, comprising 80 universities and a research staff of over 60,000 scientists. The key advantage of the proposed approach is the ease of implementation. The algorithms are of practical application and have considerably better scalability and expandability properties than state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. Moreover, the performance in terms of precision and recall, which can be further improved, seems thoroughly adequate for the typical needs of large-scale bibliometric research assessments. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.