Is There A Way To Tell Apart Two Different Authors With The Same Name In Uniprot Or Pubmed ?

Question

[Pablo Pareja]

Hi all,

I'm improving the quality of the data available regarding article/book... citations for proteins in Bio4j and would like to figure out a way to differentiate two or more authors with the same name.

I'm not aware of the existence of a unique naming system for article authors neither of its implementation/use in databases such as Uniprot or Pubmed.

I'm not very optimistic with finding a way to do this but maybe someone of you knows of such system/standard or something similar.

Cheers,

Pablo

[Neilfws]

Short answer: no, there is not.

[Pablo Pareja]

@neilfws That's what I thought from the beginning but still wanted to give it a chance...

[Pablo Pareja]

@neilfws By the way, if you post your comment as an answer I'll set it as the accepted answer. It's actually just as plain as that after seeing the other contributions.

Answer 1

[Chris Evelo]

It is indeed a hairy problem. And it actually works the other way around as well. In some cases the same author is known by more than one name. The most promising initiative (with most support by large players in the field) currently is [?]ORCID[?].

Researchers can do some things to improve the problem themselves:

1. try to be consistent in naming and use your first middle initial if you have one
2. set up lists of publications that you really wrote at for instance Mendeley or publicationslist.org
3. enter the names used for you and your publications at disambiguation services like [?]wikipeople[?].

EDIT (because of Pablo's question for data access, below is the info I got about that)

If you want to use wikipeople you can acces it on:

http://cwaapp1.liacs.nl:2020/sparql

The query below will get you the uuid for author Barend Mons:

[?]

[?]

[Mary]

We've also seen a typo problem. Someone I know is III, and the "third" designation got fused onto the last name by one journal, and it has propagated to a lot of things--including Google Scholar.

[Pablo Pareja]

ORCID seems like a good initiative, however I couldn't find any link to a database of ws available which could help me on this; (kind of the same with wikipeople). Thanks for the info anyways.

[Chris Evelo]

For ORCID that is true they are trying to bring everyone on one page and want to use databases from participants. Wikipeople is part of the conceptweb and should be available (we are using that in Open Phacts), I suppose as RDF endpoint. Will ask whether that is documented.

[Chris Evelo]

To get uuid for an author from WikiPeople you can use this

http://cwaapp1.liacs.nl:2020/sparql

SELECT DISTINCT * WHERE {
 ?s rdf:type cw:fdeafbc6-5c44-11df-b0cb-001517ac506c .
 ?s cw:ccfd174d-3465-4656-b088-7a528532fadc "Barend" .
 ?s cw:b5fdcc4e-755e-41cd-8017-5775c103057e "Mons" .
 OPTIONAL { ?s cw:d2496408-029e-4d58-9ad1-158bd0bfb1f8 ?affiliation . }
}
LIMIT 10

[Chris Evelo]

http://cwaapp1.liacs.nl:2020/sparql<br< a="">>

SELECT DISTINCT * WHERE { ?s rdf:type cw:fdeafbc6-5c44-11df-b0cb-001517ac506c . ?s cw:ccfd174d-3465-4656-b088-7a528532fadc "Barend" . ?s cw:b5fdcc4e-755e-41cd-8017-5775c103057e "Mons" . OPTIONAL { ?s cw:d2496408-029e-4d58-9ad1-158bd0bfb1f8 ?affiliation . } } LIMIT 10

Answer 2

[Gareth Palidwor]

It's a thorny problem and an ongoing area of research. There are various plans for a unique author naming system but even if implemented today, it won't solve the problem of author names published in the past.

The technical term for this is "author disambiguation", if you Google it you'll find quite a few techniques. I'm author on a paper using one such technique but it's still in review...

This is a decent review article on the topic: http://arrowsmith.psych.uic.edu/arrowsmith_uic/tutorial/ARIST_preprint.pdf

[Pablo Pareja]

Thanks, I'll have a look at the article.

Answer 3

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

People at SCOPUS maintain a big database of author disambiguations, but their data is not freely usable. You should contact them and negotiate with them.

[Pablo Pareja]

Thanks but I'm only interested in open source solutions to this.

[Pablo Pareja]

Thanks but I'm only interested in open source solutions for this.