A precision-driven evaluation protocol for author name disambiguation

Abstract

Author Name Disambiguation systems are commonly evaluated using pairwise and B$^3$ metrics, which summarize clustering quality through aggregate precision and recall but do not explicitly distinguish between lumping (merging publications from different authors) and splitting (fragmenting the publications of a single author). Because these errors can have asymmetric consequences in bibliographic applications, we propose a precision-driven evaluation framework that decomposes clustering quality into complementary instance-level and cluster-level signals. The framework introduces cluster-level Lumping Error and Splitting Error to separately quantify contamination and fragmentation, combines them with standard pairwise and B$^3$ metrics through a Composite Score, and uses the resulting measures for model selection. We characterize the diagnostic behavior of the framework through a controlled synthetic case study and assess the sensitivity of the Composite Score to its weighting scheme. The results show that the proposed structural measures distinguish error patterns that aggregate metrics can mask, while the sensitivity analysis identifies a stable region for the adopted weighting configuration. The framework is released as an open-source Python pipeline.