The DOI matches its Crossref record; 70 of the 70 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
User Identity Linkage across Online Social Networks: A Review
Abstract
The increasing popularity and diversity of social media sites has encouraged more and more people to participate on multiple online social networks to enjoy their services. Each user may create a user identity, which can includes profile, content, or network information, to represent his or her unique public figure in every social network. Thus, a fundamental question arises -- can we link user identities across online social networks? User identity linkage across online social networks is an emerging task in social media and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Advancements in user identity linkage could potentially impact various domains such as recommendation and link prediction. Due to the unique characteristics of social network data, this problem faces tremendous challenges. To tackle these challenges, recent approaches generally consist of (1) extracting features and (2) constructing predictive models from a variety of perspectives. In this paper, we review key achievements of user identity linkage across online social networks including stateof- the-art algorithms, evaluation metrics, and representative datasets. We also discuss related research areas, open problems, and future research directions for user identity linkage across online social networks.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks
Watts, D. J., & Strogatz, S. H. (1998) · Nature · doi:10.1038/30918 · Cited by 43,060
Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks
Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.509 · Cited by 36,135
Journal of The American Statistical Association
Fienberg, S. E. (2005) · Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences · doi:10.1002/0471667196.ess1317 · Cited by 6,125
LINE: Large-scale Information Network Embedding
Tang, J., Qu, M., Wang, M., Zhang, M., Yan, J., & Mei, Q. (2015) · Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web · doi:10.1145/2736277.2741093 · Cited by 5,416
Self-citationFellegi, I. P., & Sunter, A. B. (1969) · Journal of the American Statistical Association · doi:10.1080/01621459.1969.10501049 · Cited by 2,475
A Simple Generalisation of the Area Under the ROC Curve for Multiple Class Classification Problems
Hand, D. J., & Till, R. J. (2001) · Machine Learning · doi:10.1023/a:1010920819831 · Cited by 2,276
Introduction to Semi-Supervised Learning
Zhu, X., & Goldberg, A. B. (2009) · Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning · doi:10.1007/978-3-031-01548-9 · Cited by 1,766
(2015) · Springer eBooks · doi:10.1007/978-1-4899-7637-6 · Cited by 1,550
A comparison of string distance metrics for name-matching tasks
Cohen, W. W., Ravikumar, P., & Fienberg, S. E. (2003) · Cited by 1,371
THIRTY YEARS OF GRAPH MATCHING IN PATTERN RECOGNITION
CONTE, D., FOGGIA, P., SANSONE, C., & VENTO, M. (2004) · International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.1142/s0218001404003228 · Cited by 1,370
Cited by
Fake News Detection on Social Media: A Data Mining Perspective
Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J., & Liu, H. (2017) · ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter · doi:10.1145/3137597.3137600 · Cited by 3,304
Self-citationAn overview of online fake news: Characterization, detection, and discussion
Zhang, X., & Ghorbani, A. A. (2020) · Information Processing & Management · doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2019.03.004 · Cited by 997
Comprehensive Privacy Analysis on Federated Recommender System Against Attribute Inference Attacks
Zhang, S., Yuan, W., & Yin, H. (2024) · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · doi:10.1109/tkde.2023.3295601 · Cited by 97
Authorship Attribution in the Era of LLMs: Problems, Methodologies, and Challenges
Huang, B., Chen, C., & Shu, K. (2025) · ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter · doi:10.1145/3715073.3715076 · Cited by 42
“…digital realm, authorship attribution helps safe-guard the integrity of content by preventing deceptive social media activities (Hazell, 2023), detecting account compromises (Barbon et al., 2017), and linking user profiles across various social networks (Shu et al., 2017, Sinnott and Wang, 2021).”
Self-citationLiu, H., Wang, Y., Zhang, Z., Deng, J., Chen, C., & Zhang, L. Y. (2024) · Information Processing & Management · doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103720 · Cited by 34
Self-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Shu, K., Wang, S., Tang, J., Zafarani, R., & Liu, H.
- Venue
- ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
- Published
- 2017-03-22
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 5-17
- ISSN
- 1931-0145 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-0153
- OpenAlex
- W2598689838
- Cited by
- 267
- References
- 70
- FWCI
- 29.02
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: User Identity Linkage across Online Social Networks: A Review. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/3068777.3068781
- The paper
- Shu, K., Wang, S., Tang, J., Zafarani, R., & Liu, H. (2017). User Identity Linkage across Online Social Networks: A Review. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter. https://doi.org/10.1145/3068777.3068781
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.