Imaging we have a research social network whatever, and we have a new user who only fills out his name, affilation, title and location. We face the problem of associating this user with his/her publications spread in a bunch of DBs (arxiv, ISIWebOfKnowledge, Inspires, ...). The name in the publications can appear with initials, with/without accents or even two authors may appear with same or similar name. How can we find his/her actual publications in real time?
Hello Alvaro,
It is now easier than ever to locate the publications of scientists and engineers with search engines. It is easy to contact researchers and ask if a publication is theirs as most publications now contain contact information. I am not sure how to do this deconfliction in real time but you can get more information with a series of queries in various directions.
If you can download a list of publications as complete citations with authors and the list is long, you may wish to employ computational linguistics techniques. Also a group of co-authors may publish multiple papers together, some of which present more name information than others. If you can associate a name with a research group in publications from different sources, it may be easier to tell which author is which.
The other side of this problem is for authors to avoid name ambiguity on publications in the first place. It helps to put your full name on your publications to help future researchers distinguish between authors with similar names. For example, there are two scientist names "M Ceruti" publishing in chemistry, one from Piemonte, Italy, and myself.
Wishing you good fortune with your search,
Marion
Thanks Marion,
I think my question is more academic than practical. I am a bit impressed about ResearchGate's mining algorithms, because they were able to associate my name with my publications quickly. I do remember being asked if a given publication was mine or not but I don't remember exactly if the association was done before or after they asked me.
I am thinking of a problem where at the first place you have no information about the new user in the social network (only name, location and institution), firstly you don't know his/her co-authors. Contacting the author at least once could be a way out but for me it doesn't solve the problem, I want the association done on real time. Search engines can be a solution indeed as one can cross check in a lot of places, universities, alternative networks etc.
First they do not search the web for your publications. Other co-authors for any work may uploaded the paper before. So what happens is that when a new user sign in, they select all the publications with his name, affilation, location of study. Then they select all the researchers in these locations that have papers with names like your first name and did not register yet in the system. It is a complex select command only.
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