A brief survey of automatic methods for author name disambiguation

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. The challenges of dealing with author name ambiguity have led to a myriad of disambiguation methods. Generally speaking, the proposed methods usually attempt to group citation records of a same author by finding some similarity among them or try to directly assign them to their respective authors. Both approaches may either exploit supervised or unsupervised techniques. In this article, we propose a taxonomy for characterizing the current author name disambiguation methods described in the literature, present a brief survey of the most representative ones and discuss several open challenges.