What It Costs to Trust a Source: A Reproducible Method for Institutional Assessment of Author Disambiguation

Abstract

Records of research outputs are curated with care by universities, and the effort is shaped by the external sources from which candidate records are drawn. The curation required before the author identities in such sources can be trusted is examined, and a reproducible method for estimating its cost is set out. Four tests are described; two can be run on public data alone, and two are conducted against an institution's own curated record, taken from Symplectic Elements Discovery portals. The method is demonstrated on OpenAlex and Dimensions across 30 institutions. Of the publications attributed to matched researchers, 50.4\% were confirmed by the institutional record for OpenAlex and 69.6\% for Dimensions, and fewer trusted researcher profiles were retained from OpenAlex at a matched confidence threshold in each of the 30 institutions. Carried through to effort, integrating OpenAlex requires 1.5 times the person-days of review and entry of Dimensions even when each feed is filtered at the threshold that minimises the amount of review required.