authors bug and plan

[Kyle Demes]

Hi folks,

A quick update to inform you of a bug in our author assignments. 

We have just diagnosed the issue and it seems that about 20M works are impacted. 

Long story short: from some of our sources, we have been mixing up the order of authorship metadata within work records and we have been allowing alternate display names to get added to author profiles that have supported erroneous matches. For instance, Jason collaborated with his former supervisor and because of a mix-up in authorship metadata order, he's now listed as an alternate display name of Jason Priem: https://openalex.org/authors/a5023888391 

Our goal is still to launch a new author name disambiguation system native to Walden (our new system) that will vastly improve upon the existing model by this summer.

In the meantime, we are going to deploy a couple of band-aid fixes to this specific problem : (1) correcting the erroneously added display names within existing author profiles and (2) fixing the order of the authorships metadata within the 20M affected works.

We're hoping to have these fixes live by the end of next week, but wanted to give you a heads-up in the meantime.

-kyle