Sunday, April 02, 2006

Unique Digital Author Identification

How many time does it take every year for institutions or faculties to make an output of the scientific publications published by all of their staff? And how much effort does it take to make it a highly accurate one? To be sure you got all the articles from all possible staff members? And they need to be, because management decisions are based on it. The future of the organization depends on it, in some cases. All Dutch universities are now working together in METIS(in Dutch, sorry), a research information database program and one of the new projects connected to METIS is DAI, Digital Author Identification (sorry again, the title is English, but the rest just in Dutch). It's purpose is to give every Dutch scientist a unique DAI-number to make the most accurate and complete selection of publications of the author. The project organization and control is directed from the University of Groningen and the backoffice is handled by OCLC PICA. I have not been searching yet for simular project in other European countries, but if YOU know about them, please tell me. Tags: , , , , ,

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Guus,

this is an interesting development. In my recent experience with Web of Science and Scopus I have been pondering about ways to distinguish between diferrent authors sharing the same name and initials and combine name variations of the same author. I think 98% of thse cases woluld be solved if authors would add their birth date to their name. ISI and Elsevier (and perhaps Pica/OCLC as well) could make it possible for authors themselves to add their birthdates to the author fields in these databases. That would make for a nice library 2.0 solution, or would it?

Jeroen Bosman
Utrecht University Library