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Institution name disambiguation for research assessment

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Abstract

Research evaluation is a necessity for management of academic units (scientists, research groups, departments, institutes, universities) and for government decision making in science and technology. Yet, wrong conclusions may be drawn due to errors in assignments of authors to institutions. To improve existing techniques of institution name disambiguation (IND) based on word similarity or editing distance, a rule-based algorithm is proposed in this study. One-to-many relationships between an institution and many variant names under which it is referred to in bylines of publications are recognized with the aid of statistical methods and specific rules. The performance of the rule based IND algorithm is evaluated on large datasets in four fields. These experimental results demonstrate that the precision of the algorithm is high. Yet, recall should be improved.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Qiuru Peng, Hui Lin, Xueqin Jiang, and Zengli She from the college of information science and technology for their work on data verification. The authors are supported by Grant No. 13CTQ031 of the National Social Science Fund of China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, 210095, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Shuiqing Huang, Bo Yang & Sulan Yan

  2. Institute for Education and Information Sciences, IBW, University of Antwerp (UA), Venusstraat 35, 2000, Antwerp, Belgium

    Ronald Rousseau

  3. KU Leuven, 3000, Louvain, Belgium

    Ronald Rousseau

Authors
  1. Shuiqing Huang
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  2. Bo Yang
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  3. Sulan Yan
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  4. Ronald Rousseau
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Correspondence to Bo Yang.

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Huang, S., Yang, B., Yan, S. et al. Institution name disambiguation for research assessment. Scientometrics 99, 823–838 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1214-2

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