Research project

In the field of information science and library science, the problem of matching names, as they appear on a document, to an individual researcher gains of more and more importance. A few decades ago, this particular problem was not a high- priority issue, hence the quantity of documents produced had been lower, and the researchers had known each other across the respective field. Nowadays, due to the immense growth of the scientific community with ever-new generations, this level of familiarity is no longer existent. The scientific throughput in terms of the mere quantity of documents produced by researchers is steadily growing with emerging technologies and research sources. Other reasons for the increased number of scientific publications might be the stringent interest of the general public in science and elevated numbers of contributions to the scientific communication from rising industrial nations (e.g. China or India). Despite the effort spent in trying to keep an overview over the authors, many identities behind author names remain unknown.

The goal of this project is to recreate the match between name and individual. Since the final count of individuals is unknown beforehand, a grouping by last-name is performed as a first step. Within these groups, all documents have to be identified that had been written or co-authored by members of the particular group. Information from these documents can be used for identifying the individual--examples for this information are the name of the author, the affiliation of the author, the date on the paper, keywords used to tag the paper, (self-) citations, co-authorship and others. With the help of these characteristics, clusters can be formed within the groups which will ideally represent the profile of an individual researcher. With sufficient data it is hence possible to determine if the name written on the document (e.g. “Ellis, J.”) is one real person or another (e.g. “Ellis, John” or “Ellis, Jordan”). The knowledge about the tangible authorship allows the development of entirely new services. One example for such a service would be the automated and objective ranking of authors based on their scientific quality to substitute conventional methods of quality assessment used today.