recent bugs in name disambiguation

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Jason Priem

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Oct 8, 2024, 1:12:45 PM10/8/24

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Hi All,

We’ve found some bugs in our author name disambiguation caused by our recent ORCID integration; they should be fixed in January. Read on for more:

The ORCID integration added 900k unique ORCIDs to OpenAlex and connected 56M additional authorships to an ORCID. Yay! However, it also introduced two new errors we’ve recently uncovered (thanks to helpful feedback from y’all!):

Unfortunately ORCID profiles include more inaccuracies (from typos to incorrect attributions) than we’d hoped. OpenAlex now inherits these.
Although ORCID profiles tell us which papers belong to which authors, it doesn’t tell us which author on a given paper belongs to that ORCID. That still requires name string-matching and we are making errors on that.

Although both these bugs are relatively rare, the interlinked nature of name disambiguation (matching one author means un-matching a different one) means that errors cascade through the system.

So, that’s something we’re going to fix. We’ll maintain ORCID integration, but we’re rewriting the system to keep errors more localized. We’re also releasing a really slick author curation interface to make manually fixing disambiguation errors easier.

Both these changes should be live in January. In the meantime and as always, please file support tickets when you encounter bugs. Thanks for your support and feedback!