Using co-authorship networks for author name disambiguation

Abstract

With the increasing size of digital libraries (DLs) it has become a challenge to identify author names correctly and assign publications to them. The situation becomes more critical when different persons share the same name (homonym problem) or when the names of authors are presented in several different ways (synonym problem). This paper focuses on homonym names in the computer science bibliography DBLP. The goal of this study is to implement and evaluate a method which uses co-authorship networks in order to disambiguate homonym names, especially common names. The results show that the implemented method has a good performance and can be used for author name disambiguation of sparse bibliographic records.