Collecting large-scale publication data at the level of individual researchers: a practical proposal for author name disambiguation

The disambiguation of author names is an important and challenging task in bibliometrics. We propose an approach that relies on an external source of information for selecting and validating clusters of publications identified through an unsupervised author name disambiguation method. The application of the proposed approach to a random sample of Italian scholars shows encouraging results, with an overall precision, recall, and F-measure of over 96%. The proposed approach can serve as a starting point for large-scale census of publication portfolios for bibliometric analyses at the level of individual researchers.