Co-author inclusion: A novel recursive algorithmic method for dealingwith homonyms in bibliometric analysis

Steven Wooding, Kate Wilcox-Jay, Grant Lewison and Jonathan Grant
Additional contact information
Steven Wooding: RAND Europe
Kate Wilcox-Jay: Department of Information Science, City University
Grant Lewison: Department of Information Science, City University
Jonathan Grant: RAND Europe

Scientometrics, 2006, vol. 66, issue 1, No 2, 21 pages

Abstract: Summary Large scale bibliometric analysis is often hindered by the presence of homonyms, or namesakes, of the researchers of interest in literature databases. This makes it difficult to build up a true picture of a researcher's publication record, as publications by another researcher with the same name will be included in search results. Using additional information such as title and author addresses, an expert in the field can generally tell if a paper is by a researcher or a namesake; however, manual checking is not practical in large scale studies. Previously various methods have been used to address this problem, chiefly based on filtering by subject, funding acknowledgement or author address. Co-author inclusion is a novel algorithmic method based on co-authorship for dealing with problems of homonyms in large bibliometric surveys. We compared co-author inclusion and subject and funding based filter against the manual assignment of papers by a subject expert (which we assumed to be correct). The subject and funding based filtering identifies only 75% as many papers as assigned by manual scoring. By using co-author inclusion once we increase this to 95%, two further rounds produces 99% as many papers as manual filtering. Although the number of papers identified that were not assigned to the PIs manually also increases, the absolute number is low: rising from 0.2% papers with subject and funding filtering, to 3% papers for three rounds of co-author inclusion.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-006-0002-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:scient:v:66:y:2006:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-006-0002-7

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-006-0002-7

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 ().