A blog about the dblp computer science bibliography

Name disambiguation suffixes in dblp

At the end of March 2020 dblp provides bibliographies for almost 2.5 million scientists. With this number, it is not surprising that we have namesakes – scientists with the exact same name. For historical reasons, all persons in dblp must have different names. We circumvent this problem by assigning numeric suffixes to names that are not unique. E.g., there are multiple Thomas Müller in dblp. So we name them Thomas Müller 0001, Thomas Müller 0002 and so on. See our FAQ here for more details. Identifying authors with the same name is a  very important task. For example, the bibliography of Thomas Müller 0001 should not list papers by another Thomas Müller. This is a very common problem. I recently Read more

By Florian Reitz, ago

Corrections in dblp

Our primary goal is to ensure that bibliographies (list of publications) of authors in dblp are correct. This means that all publications of a person should be listed in the same list and that a list should contain only publications from one specific person. It can be difficult to ensure this and despite our best efforts, we assign publications to the wrong publication list. Because of this, we frequently check our data set and correct mistakes. The following figure shows the number of corrections we made in the last twenty years. In a merge correction, two (or more) publication lists are merged. E.g., we discover that A. Jones and Adam Jones are the same person. A split fixes a defect where Read more

By Florian Reitz, ago

Unpaywalled article links

The dblp computer science bibliography provides more than 5 million hyperlinks for research publications. Most of those links point to article landing pages within a publisher’s digital library. A growing number of publishers have adopted the open access model of publishing, thereby allowing the dissemination of research results free of cost and without any access barrier. You may have noticed that we have recently begun to mark such hyperlinks in dblp with a special orange badge signalling their availability. (Please also note that this badge is still work in progress, and that there are still plenty of openly accessible articles in dblp that go unrecognized.) However, most publishers in computer science do still demand an active subscription or a fee Read more

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

License change to CC0

Starting today, all of dblp’s data will be released under the CC0 1.0 Creative Commons Public Domain License. This affects all metadata releases, in particular the daily and monthly data dumps and data retrieved from the web APIs. This change will make it easier for you to reuse our data. In a nutshell, you can use our data without asking permission, for any purpose (including commercial purposes), and even without attributing it to us. However, we will very much appreciate if you mention dblp as the source of the data set and/or if you provide a hyperlink to https://dblp.org. Our previous license, the ODC-BY 1.0 Open Data Commons Attribution License, was selected as a fitting license back in 2011, when Read more

By Florian Reitz, ago

Open citation data and dblp

You may not always notice this, but the dblp team is constantly working on the dblp website and its APIs in order to improve the quality of the services and the value for our users. Often these are just small details and fixes, but sometimes we introduce new features. Yet, in the past, we often rolled out those features silently with no major announcements. This has led to a number of improvements that many users of dblp may not be aware of. In order to make these features more widely known, we are starting this new “feature spotlight” series of blog posts. And the start will be a big one. Open citation data in computer science Most of the time, Read more

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

Bibliographic database “dblp” celebrates silver anniversary

For more than 25 years now, the dblp computer science bibliography has been indexing and supporting international computer science research. Since today, the future of the database has also been secured at the Leibniz Center for Computer Science in Schloss Dagstuhl. On this occasion, a festive colloquium will be held at the University of Trier on Friday, November 23rd, 2018. Under the motto “25 years of dblp – 2^22 entries” the database celebrates the milestone of more than 4 million indexed computer science publications. As first keynote speaker, Prof. Dr. Gerhard Weikum (Research Director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken and former member of the German Council of Science and Humanities) will give an insight into Read more

By Marcel R. Ackermann, ago

External identifiers in dblp

There are now more than 60,000 manually confirmed external IDs linked with dblp author bibliographies. This is quite an improvement. Below you can see the number of external identifiers at the end of each year compared to the numbers in October 2018 As you can see, our definition of external identifier is a bit wider than usual. E.g., we include Twitter profiles here. ORCID, Google Scholar, Wikipedia and Twitter should be known to the readers. Wikidata is a LOD data store build on top of Wikpedia that provides query-able data. The others are GND: identifier from the German national Library see here ISNI: global authority file see here zbMath: biographies of Mathematicians see here Math Genealogy:   the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Stores relations between researchers Read more

By Florian Reitz, ago

ORCID state of dblp

Since more than a year now, dblp has intensified its efforts to link dblp bibliographies to ORCIDs used by that author. ORCID information are now added regularly to the dblp data set. The primary sources for ORCIDs are: first, the annual ORCID open data dump and, second, metadata directly provided by publishers who have started to increasingly label author signatures with ORCID information. Neither of those data sources are free of errors and data hick-ups, so we are still manually cleaning the ORCID data prior to adding them to the corpus. But overall, ORCIDs have helped us to correct numerous cases of homonymous and synonymous bibliographies in dblp, so it is absolutely worth our time. Since the past big ORCID Read more

By Florian Reitz, ago

Historical dblp file is now available

A historical version of the dblp.xml (called hdblp.xml) is now available at zenodo. hdblp contains historical revisions of all metadata records in dblp. The file can be used to reconstruct the state of dblp for each day between June 1999 and March 2018. The dblp computer science bibliography was founded in 1993. Since then, dblp has gathered (as of March 2018) data on more than 4 million publications written by about 2 million different authors. For each publication and each author, the collection maintains a simple metadata record which contains all descriptive information. The set of all records is available as daily snapshot as well as stable monthly releases. The records are modified frequently to add additional information or to Read more

By Florian Reitz, ago