Use Case AuthorClaim

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Name

AuthorClaim

aka NEP: New Economics Papers

Owner

Open Library Society c/o Thomas Krichel, krichel@openlib.org

Goal

1. The application contributes to the identification of authors (and editors, and potentially other contributors, but let's stick to the term author for simplicity.) In the scenario, document metadata records are classified by subject experts. Each expert makes a binary decision of a document belonging to a category or not. The resulting document collection forms an issue of a subject report. The application is about 13 years old.
2. Linked data can be used to further generalize the basic application, and encourage the reuse of the applications' results.

Target Audience

Academic authors, who publish research papers.

Generally, the scenario applies in all cases where a large collection can be defined, that periodically gets new additions.

Use Case Scenario

Registrants contact the service to fill in simple personal data such as name and affiliation. They build a set of name variations. The service searches for the name of the person in a database of close to 100,000,000 authorships. It proposes registrants that the item is theirs or not. The result is a profile of documents that the person has authored and not authored. The search is repeated periodically to search for new additions to the document dataset.

Application of linked data for the given use case

Linked data could be used to export the profiles, with bibliographic information as usend in AuthorClaim *as well as* the original bibliographic record.

Existing Work (optional)

A piece related work in the library domain are name authority files. Such files are usually maintained by a third person. In AuthorClaim, the author maintains the profile.

Problems and Limitations (optional)

There is no good free source for metadata about academic articles. One can compile a dataset from sources, but then there is the issue of duplication.

The main challenge for the system at this time it to build applications that will use the profiles.

Related Use Cases and Unanticipated Uses (optional)

• Use Case Community Information Service
• Use Case Virtual International Authority File (VIAF)

References (optional)

• http://authorclaim.org is the main site.
• ftp://authorclaim.org has the profiles for download
• http://ariw.org is the contributor of institutional affiliations data.
• http://3lib.org has information about some of the dataset used in AuthorClaim
• http://acis.openlib.org has information about the software used
• http://authors.repec.org has a very similar system using document
• data from the RePEc digital library.