By Catherine Gray Beuten
Integrated University Communications

(June 11, 2009) Key in your name on any online search engine and chances are you’ll likely get at least a handful of results. Not too much to slog through. But some researchers’ and educators’ names are quite common, which makes it difficult to isolate the work of any particular scholar.

Jeffrey Beall, assistant professor and metadata librarian in the Auraria Library, has found an initiative that can help our scholars to be quickly identified using search engines online.

“One of my areas of research is author name disambiguation,” he explains. “This is a problem in online scholarly databases because some authors have the exact same name or similar names, and computers are not able to separate them out.”

One tool of benefit to the university and faculty, he says, is ResearcherID. About 20 faculty have already signed up; you can find them by clicking on “Search” then entering University of Colorado Denver in the "Institution" box. Also, you can check out Beall’s page.  

“Each researcher is assigned a unique number,” he explains. “This aids in avoiding misidentification. The system also creates a page for each user and it lists the publications the database knows about.”

The project is through Thomson Reuters. Both campuses subscribe to Web of Science, this publisher's main database.

“This is a free service to faculty and graduate students and other researchers at the university and I encourage them to sign up,” Beall says. “It actually helps promote the research of individual faculty members and helps promote the university.”

To learn more about disambiguation, check out this article in Science: "Are you ready to become a number?"