Visualizing a discipline: an author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972–1995
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Name disambiguation in author citations using a K-way spectral clustering method
Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation (Information Science & Knowledge Management)
Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation (Information Science & Knowledge Management)
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
On co-authorship for author disambiguation
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Author name disambiguation in MEDLINE
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
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In this article, we explore how strongly author name disambiguation (AND) affects the results of an author-based citation analysis study, and identify conditions under which the traditional simplified approach of using surnames and first initials may suffice in practice. We compare author citation ranking and cocitation mapping results in the stem cell research field from 2004 to 2009 using two AND approaches: the traditional simplified approach of using author surname and first initial and a sophisticated algorithmic approach. We find that the traditional approach leads to extremely distorted rankings and substantially distorted mappings of authors in this field when based on first- or all-author citation counting, whereas last-author-based citation ranking and cocitation mapping both appear relatively immune to the author name ambiguity problem. This is largely because Romanized names of Chinese and Korean authors, who are very active in this field, are extremely ambiguous, but few of these researchers consistently publish as last authors in bylines. We conclude that a more earnest effort is required to deal with the author name ambiguity problem in both citation analysis and information retrieval, especially given the current trend toward globalization. In the stem cell research field, in which laboratory heads are traditionally listed as last authors in bylines, last-author-based citation ranking and cocitation mapping using the traditional approach to author name disambiguation may serve as a simple workaround, but likely at the price of largely filtering out Chinese and Korean contributions to the field as well as important contributions by young researchers. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.