A Web Service for Author Name Disambiguation in Scholarly Databases

Author Name Disambiguation (AND) is the task of clustering unique author names from publication records in scholarly or related databases. Although AND has been extensively studied and has served as an important preprocessing step for several tasks (e.g. calculating bibliometrics and scientometrics for authors), there are few publicly available tools for disambiguation in large-scale scholarly databases. Furthermore, most of the disambiguated data is embedded within the search engines of the scholarly databases, and existing application programming interfaces (APIs) have limited features and are often unavailable for users for various reasons. This makes it difficult for researchers and developers to use the data for various applications (e.g. author search) or research. Here, we design a novel, web-based, RESTful API for searching disambiguated authors, using the PubMed database as a sample application. We offer two type of queries, attribute-based queries and record-based queries which serve different purposes. Attribute-based queries retrieve authors with the attributes available in the database. We study different search engines to find the most appropriate one for processing attribute-based queries. Record-based queries retrieve authors that are most likely to have written a query publication provided by a user. To accelerate record-based queries, we develop a novel algorithm that has a fast record-to-cluster match. We show that our algorithm can accelerate the query by a factor of 4.01 compared to a baseline naive approach.

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