ORCID-linked labeled data for evaluating author name disambiguation at scale

TL;DR

This paper proposes using ORCID profiles as a scalable source of labeled data to evaluate author name disambiguation methods, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential for large-scale, nuanced performance assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a method to leverage ORCID data for large-scale evaluation of disambiguation algorithms, enabling more accessible and detailed performance analysis.

Findings

ORCID-linked data effectively capture high precision over high recall performance.

Discrepancies exist between ORCID-linked data and the population in Author-ity2009.

Labeled data can be improved as ORCID expands and is regularly updated.

Abstract

How can we evaluate the performance of a disambiguation method implemented on big bibliographic data? This study suggests that the open researcher profile system, ORCID, can be used as an authority source to label name instances at scale. This study demonstrates the potential by evaluating the disambiguation performances of Author-ity2009 (which algorithmically disambiguates author names in MEDLINE) using 3 million name instances that are automatically labeled through linkage to 5 million ORCID researcher profiles. Results show that although ORCID-linked labeled data do not effectively represent the population of name instances in Author-ity2009, they do effectively capture the 'high precision over high recall' performances of Author-ity2009. In addition, ORCID-linked labeled data can provide nuanced details about the Author-ity2009's performance when name instances are evaluated within and across ethnicity categories. As ORCID continues to be expanded to include more researchers, labeled data via ORCID-linkage can be improved in representing the population of a whole disambiguated data and updated on a regular basis. This can benefit author name disambiguation researchers and practitioners who need large-scale labeled data but lack resources for manual labeling or access to other authority sources for linkage-based labeling. The ORCID-linked labeled data for Author-tiy2009 are publicly available for validation and reuse.