A mission of cooperation and continious improvement
There are eleven “Martin, Jean” authors listed on the Persée.fr portal. How can you make a difference between two authors with the same name? And how can the articles which they actually authored be attributed accurately? It can be easy even for an experienced information professional to make misattributions.
The 3 steps of the alignment of person authorities Authority is a structured data that makes it possible to identify an author and his contributions in a unambiguous and sustainable way.
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Step 1 : Eliminating duplicates
My job is to eliminate existing duplicates and link all documents by the same author together. I detect and correct anomalies before the collections are put online and retrospectively. The main anomalies can be identified as homonyms, different forms of names (e.g. adoption of the wife’s name for a married woman), transliteration problems (e.g. Russian, non-Latin writing).
In this case, two authorites were created with form variations. They actually refer to the same person. By selecting a preserved form, the author will be “deduplicated” to keep only one accepted form.
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Step 2 : Linking Persée/IdRef authors
Once the authors have been corrected at the local level, I manually “align” the Persée authorities with IdRef, the reference repository for higher education and research maintained by Abes – the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education. The aim is to compare the form of the surname and first names, the research themes and the years of publication. If it proves to be definitely the same person, I link the two authorities.
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Step 3 : Creating missing and improving authority data
Authorities with no matching correspondence are created directly from the IdRef.fr Web service. As a member of the CORAUT network, the network of Abes authorities correspondents, I am allowed to enrich and improve the authority records already created.
Why align Persée authorities with the IdRef repository?
The process of aligning authority data with an external repository aims to promote information retrieval, sharing and citation. Currently, the scholarly output of the authors is scattered and duplicated in an unrelated way. The links that are created between the different repositories make it possible to expose richer, more reliable, sustainable and interoperable data.
Ultimately, the aim is to identify all the academic production of an author, without any error as to their identity, and without multiplying the queries in different databases. It is also to improve the visibility of researchers’ publications in search engine results. Linking also improves user navigation and bouncing from one document to the other or content aggregation. Users can thus increase their discovery about authors’ production.
Alignment of authority data in figures
| 165 023 person authorities can be found on the portal To date, 43 % of Persée authorities are aligned with IdRef More than 60 % of links are created by information specialists at production time Barely 20 % of links are created ex post About 20 % authors do not exist in IdRef and must be created manually |
Gaelle Griveau
Documentation assistant – Contact person for Persée personal authority alignments