The Identification of Authors in the Mathematical Reviews   Database

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	Issues in Science and Technology   Librarianship
	Summer 2001

	DOI:10.5062/F4KH0K9M



      

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Database Reviews and Reports
    The Identification of Authors in the Mathematical Reviews   Database
      Bert TePaske-King
  Manager, Bibliographic Services Department
  Mathematical Reviews     Norman Richert
  Administrative Editor
  Mathematical Reviews
nrichert@ams.org  

      


     The name "John Smith" is actually relatively rare in the MathSciNet Database, the  publication on the web of the Mathematical Reviews Database. As of the writing of  this piece, there were a mere nine distinct authors of mathematical papers and  books with the name "John Smith". And all have different middle initials, so they  are easy to keep straight. Contrast this with the 57 authors "Wang, Li", some with  additional names, some without, and the 32 authors "Wang, Wei" with no additional  names. With over 60 years of mathematical literature and  almost 350,000 authors, it becomes clear that maintaining author information with  the goal of distinguishing all these authors is no small task. 

    


    Every research community understands that an author is more than just a character  string in a database. In the days when Mathematical Reviews was founded it was  perhaps possible to actually know all the people working in a particular  subspecialty of mathematics. Those days are long gone. Either by amazing,  serendipitous luck or by wise foresight (probably a combination), from its founding  in 1940, Mathematical Reviews has made an attempt to identify authors of items  listed in its publications. This was done in the beginning entirely by hand, with  data for each individual (published name variants, MR numbers, etc.) kept on 3x5  cards and filed alphabetically. There was additional author correspondence, using  paper mail in the beginning, documenting research on author identification. The  author indexes that were periodically created represented a massive piece of work,  collating the information in the bibliographic listings and on the cards. 

    


    The zeal with which author identification was pursued over the years is impressive.   There has long been a concern for the "proper" form of a name. Consider all the  variations of name that might be present in the published works of a single  individual. These variations involve, for example, author taste, editorial  standards, typesetting methods, name changes, and publishing in more than one  language. Consider all the issues of name breaking, accents, spaces, hyphens, and  alphabets. In Western style names -- "First Middle Last" -- it is easy to imagine  three variations -- no middle, middle initial, full middle -- and then three more  when combined with a possibly shortened first name. This is just the start. There  are, for example, Ukrainian forms for names, Latvian/Lithuanian forms, the various  transliteration schemes associated with non-Roman alphabets, and the various  transliteration schemes associated with character-based writing. 

    The current champion in the "Total Number of Name Variations Contest" is  "Krivoshe\u\i n, Leonid Evgen\cprime evich" (using the TeX codes). In the  Mathematical Reviews Database there are 20 distinct name variations for this  author. However, all the items for this author can be easily found, with no need  to perform multiple searches using the various name possibilities. 

    This example involves only one author. The real challenge is the intersecting lists  of name variations between distinct authors. One example is "Johnson, Norman". In  the Search Author Database tool of MathSciNet , two authors are returned, with exactly the same list  of four published name variants. The sleuthing at Mathematical Reviews proved these  to be two distinct individuals. 

    


    There was a time when Mathematical Reviews even attempted to "correct" the  published form of a name, perhaps believing that some editors and publishers just  didn't try hard enough. As a survivor of those days, an internal Mathematical  Reviews concept is that of the "preferred name," which, in the past, meant the form  of the name preferred by Mathematical Reviews. This preferred name may have a  numerical superscript, in cases where there is confirming correspondence  distinguishing an individual with a given preferred name string from all other  individuals with that preferred name string. For example, 14 of the 32 "Wang, Wei"  authors are distinguished by a superscript. The 18 others are still awaiting that  correspondence. 

    Beginning in 1985, with the advent of the electronic author database, the process  of author identification has been automated to an astonishing degree. The results  of this effort, performed by the staff of MR, are available in the "Search Author  Database" tool in MathSciNet, visible in the bracketed full names in the PDF form  of a full item in MathSciNet, published in printed Mathematical Reviews headings,  and printed in the paper author indexes. There is far more information available  to MR staff to aid in the ongoing task of identifying authors. Even when the  primary publication vehicle for the MR Database was paper Mathematical Reviews,  this automation was a great advance. 

    For each author a separate "author-individual" record is maintained in the MR  Database, containing each published name variant associated with an author,  institutional affiliations, mathematical subject classifications assigned to the  author-individual's items, coauthors, and references to items indexed in the MR  Database. Each record is headed by the preferred name, which usually represents the  fullest published form of an author's name that will distinguish the  author-individual from others who publish using similar names; on occasion, an  unpublished full name is used as a preferred name if necessary to identify the  author-individual uniquely. 

    The process of author identification begins after the bibliographic data of an item  is keyed into the (internal) MR Database. That bibliographic data includes a name  string, which reflects manual breaking and other markup. The first pass in the  identification process is generated automatically by a number of machine algorithms  that compare a name string that appears on an item, the institutional affiliation  listed for the author, and the classification for the item assigned by the MR  editors against author-individuals already in the MR Database. These programs find  the best possible (ideally exact) match on all three elements. The programs are  successful roughly eighty percent of the time. 

    For the remaining twenty percent, the program makes its "best guess" on a potential  match to an author-individual in the database, using preset algorithms to rank  possible matches. It is on this remaining twenty percent that most of the MR staff  time allotted to author identification is spent: the keyboarded name string is  checked for typos or a mistaken name break; the intent of the journal in name  presentation is carefully checked (journals do make errors in the presentation of  first name/family name); alternate spellings are examined; bibliographies are  checked for self-citations; coauthors are checked for a possible match. When all  possibilities available via the item at hand are exhausted, staff use internet and  web-based tools to search for authors, e.g., searching for full names at  university/department web sites or for curricula vitae with lists of publications.  Authors are contacted by e-mail or paper mail if necessary. 

    When the author database was made electronic in 1985, no attempt was made to  incorporate the information associated with pre-1985 items. From the point of view  of a paper publication vehicle, the gain in expedited author identification was not  enough to justify the expense. The first publication in 1996 of the MathSciNet web  interface to the Mathematical Reviews Database changed everything. The ease with  which authors could be searched electronically provided an impetus to create  additional author-individual database records from items indexed or reviewed in  Mathematical Reviews prior to 1985. One of the truisms of electronic tools of all  kinds is that when users see something they like, they want more of it. The ease  of searching authors of post-1985 items produced a demand for that same ease in  searching authors of pre-1985 items. 

    To bring in the pre-1985 author data, a one-time matching algorithm was run. It  assigned attribution of the older items to author-individuals already in the MR  Database, based on exact string matches with known variations of an author's name.   The decision was made to err on the side of "splitting" personalities, rather than  "collapsing" personalities. If no matching name could be found in the MR Database,  a new author-individual record was created. The magnitude of the task made  handwork prohibitively expensive. Needless to say, this process could not be  perfect, if only because publishers provided less useful identifying information in  the "old days." For example, in cases where an author used one form of her or his  name on items written prior to 1985 (say "Smith, J. M."), but a different form of  the name on later items ("Smith, John M."), a new author-individual record for  "Smith, J. M." was created in the MR Database. Most of the work done for the  earlier printed author indexes was not carried over to the electronic author  database. Nor was all the information on the 3X5 cards. 

    The nature of the work on the pre-1985 data produced anomalies in Author Search of  which serious users of MathSciNet should be aware. Most of these are multiple  author records corresponding to the same individual, but there are also cases of  one "MR individual" really being two or more individuals. 

    Tools are available to MR staff to examine and combine author-individual records  and to make these changes available on MathSciNet virtually overnight. MathSciNet  users have also proved to be of invaluable assistance in this endeavor, and users  are encouraged to notify Mathematical Reviews of any anomalies they notice in  author information presented in "Search Author Database" searches or clicking on an  author name in a headline. There are about 250 such communications from MathSciNet  users each year. 

    The results of all this work can be accessed in MathSciNet in several ways. The  least desirable way to search for an author is to use the "Full Search" or "Basic  Search" tools. These searches are basically string searches on the published name  string of a paper (as keyed at Mathematical Reviews) and the preferred name, if it  is different. Thus, for example, a search in the "Author" field of a "Basic  Search" for "Ross, Kenneth" would not return any items published under "Ross, K.  A." Although there are items in the MR Database for which the published author  name is "Ross, K. A.", the preferred name of that author is "Ross, Kenneth Allen".   A search for "Ross, Kenneth A*" would return the items for "Ross, K. A.", but it  would also return the items for "Ross, Kenneth Andrew".

    


    In most cases, the best way to search for an author is to use the "Search Author  Database" tool of MathSciNet. Searches using the "Search Author Database" tool  return lists of author-individuals rather than lists of papers. At that point, a  selection can be made among people, rather than among papers. The listed variants  of the author name may be a quick way to distinguish between the authors returned  by the search. 

    On the other hand, this is not much help in the "Wang, Wei" example. In this case,  it is best to use the "Full Search" tool, with "Wang, Wei" in the author field and  some additional information: e.g., a title fragment, a Mathematics Subject  Classification, or a year of publication. Once the "Wang, Wei" desired is  identified in a particular item, clicking on the author name in that headline or  full item will return the headline list for all the items connected to that  particular "Wang, Wei." For an author whose publication record crosses the 1985  boundary, the last statement may not be accurate. The authors of the pre-1985  items can be thought of as a collection of author-individual "maybe"'s. An author  search will present a list of all the possible "maybe"'s. Of course, some of these  "maybe"'s may, in fact, be the same person. 

    Librarians are in many cases in a better position than mathematicians to fully  understand the nuances explained here, and we hope that they can take a leadership  role in educating the user community. A helpful discussion about author  identification, as it is presented in the MathSciNet interface to the Mathematical  Reviews Database, can be found in the booklet "MathSciNet--Mathematical Reviews on  the Web: Guiding you through the literature of mathematics".  Download a copy in  PDF from   http://www.ams.org/msnhtml/guidebook.pdf. A printed copy may be obtained free  of charge at the AMS Bookstore, at {http://www.ams.org/bookstore-getitem/item=MRBK}. We encourage librarians to  order as many copies as they think they might be able to distribute. 

    


    The unique identification of authors is one of the distinguishing features of the  Mathematical Reviews Database and its publication in MathSciNet. The data  collected since 1940 is an invaluable resource for the mathematical research  community and the information professional community. We hope that this article  can help to build wider awareness of what the identification of authors involves  and how MathSciNet users can take advantage of it. 

      

  

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