"Seed+Expand": A validated methodology for creating high quality publication oeuvres of individual researchers

The study of science at the individual micro-level frequently requires the disambiguation of author names. The creation of author's publication oeuvres involves matching the list of unique author names to names used in publication databases. Despite recent progress in the development of unique author identifiers, e.g., ORCID, VIVO, or DAI, author disambiguation remains a key problem when it comes to large-scale bibliometric analysis using data from multiple databases. This study introduces and validates a new methodology called seed+expand for semi-automatic bibliographic data collection for a given set of individual authors. Specifically, we identify the oeuvre of a set of Dutch full professors during the period 1980-2011. In particular, we combine author records from the National Research Information System (NARCIS) with publication records from the Web of Science. Starting with an initial list of 8,378 names, we identify "seed publications" for each author using five different approaches. Subsequently, we "expand" the set of publication in three different approaches. The different approaches are compared and resulting oeuvres are evaluated on precision and recall using a "gold standard" dataset of authors for which verified publications in the period 2001-2010 are available.Comment: Paper accepted for the ISSI 2013, small changes in the text due to referee comments, one figure added (Fig 3

Evolving collaboration networks in Scientometrics in 1978-2010: a micro-macro analysis

This paper reports first results on the interplay of different levels of the science system. Specifically, we would like to understand if and how collaborations at the author (micro) level impact collaboration patterns among institutions (meso) and countries (macro). All 2,541 papers (articles, proceedings papers, and reviews) published in the international journal Scientometrics from 1978-2010 are analyzed and visualized across the different levels and the evolving collaboration networks are animated over time. Studying the three levels in isolation we gain a number of insights: (1) USA, Belgium, and England dominated the publications in Scientometrics throughout the 33-year period, while the Netherlands and Spain were the subdominant countries; (2) the number of institutions and authors increased over time, yet the average number of papers per institution grew slowly and the average number of papers per author decreased in recent years; (3) a few key institutions, including Univ Sussex, KHBO, Katholieke Univ Leuven, Hungarian Acad Sci, and Leiden Univ, have a high centrality and betweenness, acting as gatekeepers in the collaboration network; (4) early key authors (Lancaster FW, Braun T, Courtial JP, Narin F, or VanRaan AFJ) have been replaced by current prolific authors (such as Rousseau R or Moed HF). Comparing results across the three levels reveals that results from one level might propagate to the next level, e.g., top rankings of a few key single authors can not only have a major impact on the ranking of their institution but also lead to a dominance of their country at the country level; movement of prolific authors among institutions can lead to major structural changes in the institution networks. To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive and the only multi-level study of Scientometrics conducted to date