Institutional Name Confusion on Citation Indexes: The Example of the Names of Turkish Hospitals

Abstract

Effectiveness of academia has usually been evaluated by using the number of publications. However, indexing with natural language on citation indexes makes evaluation process problematic for author affiliation. Affiliation information mistakes made by authors or editors can cause confusion during the indexing period. Consequently, visibility of the institutions in the citation indexes may reduce, different rankings for institutions may emerge and bibliometric studies may generate inaccurate results. It is important to understand these standardization problems in citation indexes to be able to fix them. The main aim of this study is to present name confusions of author affiliations within the citation indexes by using the example of the names of Turkish Training and Research Hospitals (TRH). In order to achieve this, 198,687 publications within the Web of Science, addressed in Turkey and produced between 1928 and 2009 were evaluated. The preliminary findings show that there are 65 unique TRHs which were mentioned with several different formats in the address section of the citation indexes. All these varying affiliation information were unified as a standard format for this study. It is observed that the names of these hospitals cause the main confusion. For example, there are four different “Numune TRH”s in different cities of Turkey. In such a case, if the author does not mention the city name in the address field, confusion becomes inevitable. In addition to that, affiliation information mistakes generally appear in the form of wrong spelling, abbreviation and translation mistakes. Findings of this study would bring up aforementioned confusion and present some recommendations to solve it.