Author Disambiguation in PubMed: Evidence on the Precision and Recall of Author-ity among NIH-Funded Scientists

We examined the usefulness (precision) and completeness (recall) of the Author-ity author disambiguation for PubMed articles by associating articles with scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In doing so, we exploited established unique identifiers-Principal Investigator (PI)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2016-07, Vol.11 (7), p.e0158731-e0158731
Main Authors: Lerchenmueller, Marc J, Sorenson, Olav
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Analysis
Authorship
Automation
Bibliographic data bases
Biology and Life Sciences
Co authorship
Collaboration
Computer and Information Sciences
Databases, Factual
Ethical aspects
Information processing
Information science
Inventors
Life sciences
Medicine and Health Sciences
Names
National Institutes of Health (U.S.) - economics
Neural networks
People and Places
Physical Sciences
Publications - statistics & numerical data
PubMed - statistics & numerical data
Recall
Researchers
Science - economics
Science Policy
Scientists
Scientometrics
Services
United States
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Summary:We examined the usefulness (precision) and completeness (recall) of the Author-ity author disambiguation for PubMed articles by associating articles with scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In doing so, we exploited established unique identifiers-Principal Investigator (PI) IDs-that the NIH assigns to funded scientists. Analyzing a set of 36,987 NIH scientists who received their first R01 grant between 1985 and 2009, we identified 355,921 articles appearing in PubMed that would allow us to evaluate the precision and recall of the Author-ity disambiguation. We found that Author-ity identified the NIH scientists with 99.51% precision across the articles. It had a corresponding recall of 99.64%. Precision and recall, moreover, appeared stable across common and uncommon last names, across ethnic backgrounds, and across levels of scientist productivity.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0158731