[Foundation-l] WikiAuthors - disambiguation of author names in MEDLINE

Tue Jan 24 05:50:36 UTC 2006

I am proposing a Wiki project for the disambiguation of author names
in MEDLINE [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/], an online database
of biomedical literature, which is maintained by the National Library
of Medicine. This resource contains more than 11 million references
and it is used by researchers worldwide.

I am doing this because
(1) ambiguous names (like J. Smith) are a problem for certain analyses
of the database,
(2) the institution developing the database is not considering
approaching this problem in the short term,
(3) name disambiguation can only be carried by the authors or close
colleagues, thus a collaborative project is needed.

See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAuthors

I would be glad to have your comments/help.

Thanks,
Miguel Andrade