Importance of Name Disambiguation in Scientific Databases

Abstract

Ambiguity in digital citation databases is a major bottleneck in attribution of proper credit to authors and thus hampers the process of profiling authors in true sense. It is quite common for academics and researchers to share common or similar names and the recent surge of digital citation records has amplified the problem exponentially. Realizing the prowess of information and communication technologies and the ease with which the information can be stored, managed and shared online, traditional publishers and databases have joined the bandwagon and embarked on the journey of digitizing their records. In the absence of an effective mechanism, it becomes extremely difficult for a computer to discriminate between similar entities and more so in case of our names. This paper highlights some of the major advantages and drawbacks of prominent categories of solutions by supporting the inferences with relevant backups, wherever required.