Researchers’ Publication Patterns and Their Use for Author Disambiguation

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years we have been witnessing an increase in the need for advanced bibliometric indicators for individual researchers and research groups, for which author disambiguation is needed. Using the complete population of university professors and researchers in the Canadian province of Québec (N = 13,479), their papers as well as the papers authored by their homonyms, this paper provides evidence of regularities in researchers’ publication patterns. It shows how these patterns can be used to automatically assign papers to individuals and remove papers authored by their homonyms. Two types of patterns were found: (1) at the individual researchers’ level and (2) at the level of disciplines. On the whole, these patterns allow the construction of an algorithm that provides assignment information for at least one paper for 11,105 (82.4 %) out of all 13,479 researchers—with a very low percentage of false positives (3.2 %).KeywordsIndividual ResearcherBibliometric DataReference IndexLight ZonePublication PatternThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.