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Accuracy of author names in bibliographic data sources: an Italian case study

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Abstract

We investigate the accuracy of how author names are reported in bibliographic records excerpted from four prominent sources: WoS, Scopus, PubMed, and CrossRef. We take as a case study 44,549 publications stored in the internal database of Sapienza University of Rome, one of the largest universities in Europe. While our results indicate generally good accuracy for all bibliographic data sources considered, we highlight a number of issues that undermine the accuracy for certain classes of author names, including compound names and names with diacritics, which are common features to Italian and other Western languages.

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Acknowledgements

First of all, we wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. We are also indebted to Irene Bongioanni, Adriano Fazzone, Emanuele Fusco, and all members of Sapienza University of Rome who contributed to the analysis and cleaning of the bibliographic records stored in our local repository. Marco Schaerf was partially supported by H2020 Project Second Hands under grant Agreement No. 643950.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering “Antonio Ruberti”, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Camil Demetrescu & Marco Schaerf

  2. Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy

    Andrea Ribichini

  3. Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications, North Caucasus Federal University, Stavropol, Russian Federation

    Marco Schaerf

Authors
  1. Camil Demetrescu
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  2. Andrea Ribichini
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  3. Marco Schaerf
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Correspondence to Camil Demetrescu.

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Demetrescu, C., Ribichini, A. & Schaerf, M. Accuracy of author names in bibliographic data sources: an Italian case study. Scientometrics 117, 1777–1791 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2945-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2945-x

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