Scientific publishing giants focus on Author ID

Elsevier’s Scopus database and Thomson Scientific have gone head to head with the launch of author identification tools.

Amanda Spiteri, Elsevier’s director of marketing, said: “We’ve been working on Author Identifier almost since the start of Scopus – the key issue is being able to correctly identify different authors sharing the same name, and also be confident you capture all results from authors whose name is expressed in different ways.”

Spiteri said Scopus has developed a new algorithm for Author Identifier. “Most use an authority file or index of variants of author names. Our approach uses many data points associated with an author – not just the name. This allows us to achieve over 99% accuracy in matching documents to the correct author.”

Scopus cross-references information already present in the 27 million record database about the author’s publication record.

The new system solicits feedback from the authors via a feedback button on the author details page, giving an overview of the author’s publication record, citation overview and co-authors.

Thomson Scientific’s suite of authorship search tools will assist author identification in its Web of Science service in response to customer difficulties in searching for authors.

Its tools include Author Finder and Author Disambiguation, which allow users to distinguish one John or Jane Smith from another. This tool is based on an algorithm where all of the elements in the indexed records and the full range of citation relationships (eg author to publisher) have been combined with mathematical techniques to organise all records in the Web of Science by “authorships” – groups of papers by the same author.