Article Summary for Lecture # 9 - Rotenberg

The Author Challenge: 

Identification of Self 

in the Scholarly Literature

                Open access publishing, digital repositories, and contribution to scientific thought outside of traditional publishing are a reflection of the faster paced research arena. In the era of expanding research, to enable proper attribution of contributions to the correct individual some items need to be addressed:

• Individual researchers are under increased pressure to find collaborators and to keep up-to-date with field trends, which is imperative to professional branding and reputation management.
• The management of researcher identity by universities and other research organizations is a time-consuming process that institutions are required to do for institutional and government research assessment exercises.
• Publishers, granting organizations, and professional and academic societies need to properly identify the researchers utilizing their systems for tracking and management purposes, and for finding reviewers.

                The main issue of name ambiguity is how it affects career advancement, tenure, global collaboration between researchers, and grant funding. According to Rotenberg and Kushmerick proper identification is contributed to by paying attention to the following:

• Name Variations
• Many authors share the same first and/or last name.
• Authors use different names on different papers.
• Middle initials may or may not be included with the author name.
• Non-Roman names may have a variety of spellings and word orders. They may also be improperly transliterated.
• Increase in Global Research Output
• Scholarly research around the world has been increasing. The number of publications from China has increased from over 20,000 papers in 1998 to 112,000 in 2008.
• This global research has introduced new forms of communications, and proper identification can help accurately attribute scholars' activities.
• Funding and Tenure Requirements
• Academic institutions within Australia and the United Kingdom are required to participate in government run research evaluations, which require institutions to supply accurate reports of publication output for their university faculty.
• Highly multi-authored papers (more than 50,100,200, and 500) authors involved are on the rise.

           Keeping these in mind, and properly identifying various facets can let us know who researchers are, what they do, where they work, what kinds of information they publish, who they are connected to, an who they want to know. This comes in handy when making connections for future research or collaboration. Thomas Reuters is on the forefront of normalizing the collection of scholar data. in 2006, he introduced two features into Web of Science:

• Author finder - a search aid that utilizes the various indexed fields in Web of Science, such as author names, institution names, and subject areas to help a user identify the correct set of records for their chosen author. 
• Distinct Author Sets - aid that presents sets or clusters of publications that have been computationally grouped together using a proprietary algorithm, which helps users to pinpoint the publications of an individual. The algorithm takes into account a number of data points like author names, institution names, and citing and cited author relationships. 

           A really neat element of Web of Science is that users can provide feedback on author sets. This feedback alongside automatic clustering takes advantage of the best information and resources available. Another innovation of Reuters is ResearcherID. ResearcherID offers scholars and researchers the opportunity to connect their scholarly works to a unique identifier called a ResearcherID number. These numbers are attached to the individual throughout their career across disciplines and institutions, and the interface allows the chance for scholars to network through a number of search options (geographic heat map, keyboard, country tag clouds, and traditional fielded search page). However, you do not have to have an account to search public profiles, which allows the budding researcher to make contacts.

         ResearcherID allows users to classify themselves into a given area of research/expertise, and to integrate their profile on their website, so those perusing the web can find them and link to their work. As of July 2011, 127,000 unique ResearcherID profiles were created and over 2 million publication records from Web of Science  have been claimed by authors via ResearcherID. The author's conclude there are many initiative devoted to adding clarity to the traditionally unclear world of author identity in scholarly literature, but it is by no means solved.

         This is a really interesting article that really outlines how authorship can be an issue in the modern, fast-paced research environment. I would suggest researchers alongside information organizers to take a look at Rotenberg and Kushmerick's work. I came away from this article with an idea of the types of sources I could use upon completion of published research, or to find researchers on a specific topic. Fortunately, electronic organization of information has helped to partially resolve some issues in author recognition, and hopefully the information specialists of the future can completely eradicate any form of error or misrepresentation in scholarly work.

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For more information see the full article (citation below)!

Rotenberg, E. & Kushmericka, A. (2011). The author challenge: Identification of self in the scholarly literature. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 49(6):503-20.