On co-authorship for author disambiguation

Abstract

Author name disambiguation deals with clustering the same-name authors into different individuals. To attack the problem, many studies have employed a variety of disambiguation features such as coauthors, titles of papers/publications, topics of articles, emails, affiliations, etc. Among these, co-authorship is the most easily accessible and influential, since inter-person acquaintances represented by co-authorship could discriminate the identities of authors more clearly than other features. This study attempts to explore the net effects of co-authorship on author clustering in bibliographic data.