Incremental author name disambiguation by exploiting domain‐specific heuristics

The vast majority of the current author name disambiguation solutions are designed to disambiguate a whole digital library (DL) at once considering the entire repository. However, these solutions besides being very expensive and having scalability problems, also may not benefit from eventual manual corrections, as they may be lost whenever the process of disambiguating the entire repository is required. In the real world, in which repositories are updated on a daily basis, incremental solutions that disambiguate only the newly introduced citation records, are likely to produce improved results in the long run. However, the problem of incremental author name disambiguation has been largely neglected in the literature. In this article we present a new author name disambiguation method, specially designed for the incremental scenario. In our experiments, our new method largely outperforms recent incremental proposals reported in the literature as well as the current state‐of‐the‐art non‐incremental method.