How to kill inventors: testing the Massacrator© algorithm for inventor disambiguation

Michele Pezzoni, Francesco Lissoni and Gianluca Tarasconi ()
Additional contact information
Gianluca Tarasconi: Università Bocconi

Scientometrics, 2014, vol. 101, issue 1, No 22, 477-504

Abstract: Abstract Inventor disambiguation is an increasingly important issue for users of patent data. We propose and test a number of refinements to the original Massacrator algorithm, originally proposed by Lissoni et al. (The keins database on academic inventors: methodology and contents, 2006) and now applied to APE-INV, a free access database funded by the European Science Foundation. Following Raffo and Lhuillery (Res Policy 38:1617–1627, 2009) we describe disambiguation as a three step process: cleaning&parsing, matching, and filtering. By means of sensitivity analysis, based on MonteCarlo simulations, we show how various filtering criteria can be manipulated in order to obtain optimal combinations of precision and recall (type I and type II errors). We also show how these different combinations generate different results for applications to studies on inventors’ productivity, mobility, and networking; and discuss quality issues related to linguistic issues. The filtering criteria based upon information on inventors’ addresses are sensitive to data quality, while those based upon information on co-inventorship networks are always effective. Details on data access and data quality improvement via feedback collection are also discussed.

Keywords: Patent data; Inventors; Name disambiguation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C15 C81 O34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-014-1375-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: How to kill inventors: testing the Massacrator© algorithm for inventor disambiguation (2014)
Working Paper: How To Kill Inventors: Testing The Massacrator© Algorithm For Inventor Disambiguation (2012)
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:spr:scient:v:101:y:2014:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-014-1375-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-014-1375-7

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().