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The effects of the challenges in the transliteration of Persian names into English on the recall of retrieved results in the web of science

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Abstract

The objective of this study was to examine the effects of the challenges in the transliteration of Persian names into English on the recall of retrieved results in the Web of Science. The statistical population of this study included the names of all Iranian researchers in the Web of Science database who had published an English article in the period 2010–2017. The initial number of these names was 3,110,873. After refining the data, the number of names was reduced to 11,242, of which 3959 were unique names with different spellings. Bibexcel and Excel were used to analyze the data. The challenges identified were divided into four groups: “consonants”, “vowels”, “omitted or repeated letters”, and “pronunciation”. The effect of each of the above-mentioned challenges on the recall of retrieved results was examined, and the spelling form that had the highest retrieval percentage and frequency among the examples retrieved for each challenge was determined. The results showed that the non-uniform transliteration of Persian names into English and different name spellings resulted in a decrease in recall.

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Notes

  1. The Soundex algorithm is an algorithm that uses phonemes instead of spelling to index words. This method focuses on consonant words and puts them in a group despite a slight difference in spelling.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Knowledge and Information Science, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

    Mahsa Kaveh

  2. Department of Knowledge and Information Science, Faculty of Education and Psychology, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

    Mahdieh Mirzabeigi & Hajar Sotudeh

  3. Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

    Amirsaeid Moloodi

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  1. Mahsa Kaveh
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  2. Mahdieh Mirzabeigi
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Correspondence to Mahdieh Mirzabeigi.

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Kaveh, M., Mirzabeigi, M., Sotudeh, H. et al. The effects of the challenges in the transliteration of Persian names into English on the recall of retrieved results in the web of science. Scientometrics 127, 1099–1128 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04234-0

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