Abstract
In this study, the accuracy of the Author ID (author identification) in the Scopus bibliographic database was evaluated. For this purpose, we adopted the KAKEN database as the source of “correct data”. KAKEN is an open database and is the biggest funding database in Japan because it manages all the information of the largest public fund for academic researchers. In the KAKEN database, each researcher has a unique Researcher Number, which must be used when a proposal or annual report is submitted to the database. Thus, the concordance between each researcher and the associated Researcher Number is checked automatically and constantly. For this reason, we used this number to evaluate the Scopus Author ID. After matching bibliographic records between Scopus and KAKEN, we calculated recall and precision of the Scopus Author ID for Japanese researchers. We found that recall and precision were around 98 and 99 % respectively. This result showed the Author ID, though not perfectly accurate in terms of individual identification, was reliable enough to be used as a new tool for bibliometrics. We hope that academic researchers outside Japan will also evaluate the accuracy of the Scopus Author ID as a tool to uniquely identify individual researchers.
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Notes
KAKEN is freely available at http://kaken.nii.ac.jp/en/.
The same description about weighting between precision and recall has been described by Moed et al. (2013).
Here, “researchers who have only one paper” refers to researchers who are connected by their Researcher Number in KAKEN and their Author ID in Scopus through only one paper. It does not mean they have produced only one paper in their research lives.
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Kawashima, H., Tomizawa, H. Accuracy evaluation of Scopus Author ID based on the largest funding database in Japan. Scientometrics 103, 1061–1071 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1580-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1580-z