Automatic Methods for Disambiguating Author Names in Bibliographic Data Repositories

Name ambiguity in the context of bibliographic citation records is a hard problem that affects the quality of services and content in digital libraries and similar systems. This problem occurs when an author publishes works under distinct names or distinct authors publish works under similar names. The challenges of dealing with author name ambiguity have led to a myriad of name disambiguation methods. In this tutorial, we characterize such methods by means of a proposed taxonomy, present an overview of some of the most representative ones and discuss open challenges.