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Grant support

This work was partly supported by Grant No. PID2022-136374NB-C22 funded by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (Spain), by the Aragon Government through the research group E30_23R and by the Universidad de Zaragoza under the temporary research contract program "Programa Investigo" (Programa Investigo-081-74), funded by the Servicio Publico de Empleo Estatal and the European Union-NextGenerationEU.

Analysis of institutional authors

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August 8, 2025
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3SA: an entity-linking algorithm for the Institution Name Disambiguation problem in affiliations using edit distance

Publicated to:Scientometrics. 130 (7): 4073-4091 - 2025-07-16 130(7), DOI: 10.1007/s11192-025-05368-1

Authors: Muñoz-Jordán D; Ruiz G; Cabriada P; Durán JL; Iñiguez D; Rivero A

Affiliations

Fdn ARAID, Zaragoza 50018, Spain - Author
Kampal Data Slut SL, Calle Maria Zambrano 31,Planta 15, Zaragoza 50018, Spain - Author
Univ Zaragoza, Inst Biocomp & Fis Sistemas Complejos, Calle Mariano Esquillor Gomez, Zaragoza 50018, Spain - Author

Abstract

When researchers sign an article, they reference all the institutions they belong to, writing one or more affiliations containing them. Researchers sign in many different ways, and different journals also have varying standards in this regard. In this article we will focus on the Institution Name Disambiguation (IND) problem, also known as Organization Name Disambiguation (OND). Common issues associated to IND problem arise because researchers may write the name of the institution differently in various publications, and different researchers from the same institution will certainly write it differently as well. On the other hand, a researcher may be affiliated with several centers simultaneously or at different stages of their professional life, which introduces the factor of time as an additional variable to consider. As a result, analyzing and linking scientific work from different areas for various institutions is challenging. Databases like Web of Science collect articles from various journals across different fields. In this article, we will propose a method named 3 Steps Affiliation (3SA) based on, firstly, preprocessing the information, secondly, candidate extraction via localization and classification type of the institutions and, thirdly, on entity linking to extract the institutions from affiliations downloaded from Web of Science articles using an edit distance. We use a world-wide open source database with more than 100k institutions to solve the Institution Name Disambiguation problem. We show that the proposed method has a state-of-art performance by comparing it with other methods. Additionally, we evaluate the impact of different edit distance metrics within our method to identify which yields the best results.

Keywords

Affiliations disambiguationEdit distancEdit distanceEntity linkingInfometricsInstitution name disambiguationOrganization name disambiguation

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Scientometrics due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2025, it was in position 71/175, thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications.

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-09-07:

  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 1 (PlumX).