Accuracy of Author Names in Bibliographic Data Sources: An Italian Case Study

The frequency of omitted apostrophes in WoS was almost fifteen times higher than in Scopus.

“while the frequency of omitted apostrophes in WoS was almost fifteen times higher than in Scopus.”

In a recent large-scale analysis, author name mistakes were present in both databases, but in Scopus frequencies were lower for almost all error types except cases where part of the first name was mistakenly assigned to the last name, which appeared in fewer than 1% of Scopus entries and were not detected at all in WoS.

“A recent large scale analysis has shown that, although these mistakes are present in both DBs, but, in Scopus, frequencies are lower for almost all error types in author names, except for the cases where part of the first name is being mistakenly assigned to the last name, which appeared in fewer than 1% of Scopus entries, while, in WoS, were not detected at all.”

A considerable portion of mistakes in publication metadata is caused by incorrect spelling due to language-specific characters, which may be incorrectly identified by optical character recognition systems.

“A considerable portion of mistakes in the publication metadata is caused by incorrect spelling due to the presence of language specific characters (e.g., letters with diacritics), which may be incorrectly identified by optical character recognition (OCR) systems [65,70,71].”

Incorrect assignment of part of the last name as a first name was relatively common in both databases, at 12.61% in WoS and 10.19% in Scopus.

“the incorrect assignment of part of the last name as a first name was relatively common in both DBs (12.61% in WoS and 10.19% in Scopus).”

In both databases, in almost all last names containing diacritics, approximately 95%, diacritics were omitted, but none were incorrectly imported.

“in both DBs in almost all last names (approx. 95%), containing diacritics (only approx. 1% of investigated names contained this feature), diacritics were omitted, but none of the diacritics were incorrectly imported [71].”

In both databases, incomplete and mistyped last names were quite rare, rarely exceeding 1%, with approximately two times more such mistakes in WoS than in Scopus.

“although, in both DBs, incomplete and mistyped last names were quite rare (rarely exceeding 1%), approximately two-times more of these mistakes were identified in WoS when compared to Scopus”

In the case of female researchers, additional surname variants may appear due to a change in marital status.

“In the case of female researchers', additional surname variants may also appear due to the change in marital status [70,71].”