A Brief Survey of Automatic Methods for Author Name Disambiguation

摘要

Name ambiguity in the context of bibliographic citation records is a hard problem that affects the quality of ser vices and content in digital libraries and similar systems. The challenges of dealing with author name ambiguity have led to a myriad of disambiguation methods. Gener ally speaking, the proposed methods usually attempt to group citation records of a same author by finding some similarity among them or try to directly assign them to their respective authors. Both approaches may either ex ploit supervised or unsupervised techniques. In this ar ticle, we propose a taxonomy for characterizing the cur rent author name disambiguation methods described in the literature, present a brief survey of the most repre sentative ones and discuss several open challenges.