Author-ity: A tool for identifying Medline articles written by a particular author

Although our long-term goal is to disambiguate all papers into distinct authors, the current version of the Author-ity tool simply provides a pairwise ranking of articles by similarity to a given index paper, across 9 different attributes. The PrM value shown is an estimate of the probability that the paper is authored or co-authored by the same individual as the index paper, GIVEN NO OTHER INFORMATION than what is in the Medline record. Most of the papers with PrM value of greater than 0.5 will correspond to the same author, and the higher the value, the greater the chance that they share the same author. However, many papers by the same author will have PrM values below 0.5 because of missing data or because of variations in the types of papers that the person produced. (In fact, the ranking among papers known to be written by the same author provides one way of assessing and tracking this variation.)

Reference:
Torvik VI, Weeber M, Swanson DR, Smalheiser NR. A probabilistic similarity metric for Medline records: a model for author name disambiguation. JASIST 2005; 56(2): 140-158.

Last modified: Tue May 17 00:42:51 CDT 2005