When different persons have an identical author name. How frequent are homonyms?

Dag W. Aksnes

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008, vol. 59, issue 5, 838-841

Abstract: The phenomenon that different persons may have the same author name (homonymy) represents a major problem for publication analysis at individual levels and for retriving publications based on author names more generally. In such cases, all publications from the persons sharing the name will be collected in search results. This makes it difficult to provide a true picture of a researcher's publication output. The present study examines how frequent homonyms occur in a population of more than 30,000 individuals. The population represents the entire set of research personell in Norway. It is found that 14% of the persons share their author name with one or more other individuals. For the remaining 86% there is a one‐to‐one correspondence. Thus, for the large majority of persons, homonyms do not represent a problem. In the final part of the article, potential practical applications of these findings are given particular attention.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20788

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamist:v:59:y:2008:i:5:p:838-841

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-2890

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().