Problematic Published Name Records on Clarivate Researcher Profiles
Clarivate Web of Science provides researcher profiles, recording their academic activities including publications, editorial contributions, and review. However, the 5GH team recently finds that on some profiles, the "Published Names" records are problematic.
Take the profile of Yang Xi (Web of Science ResearcherIDKEH-5204-2024) [1] for example. It documents dozens of published names for XI, such as "Jiang, Jianping", "Wu, Rongling", "Wu, Tangchun", and many others. Most of these names are not related to XI, and the 5GH team believes these names are from other persons instead of XI. Therefore, the academic activity records with these names are improperly assigned to XI.
It is not clear these mistakes were caused by the Clarivate system atomaticaly adding the records to the profiles, or caused by the researchers manually adding the records. The 5GH team is waiting reply from Clarivate.
This issue is widespread. The 5GH team checked the profiles of 20 researchers who are affiliated to Peking University and have top document (publication indexed by the Web of Science Core Collections and preprints) numbers, and found that 14 profiles have problematic "Published Names" issues. Similar proportions were observed among the top 20 researchers with Sun Yat-Sen University (20/20), Fudan University (17/20) and Xi'an Jiaotong University (11/20).
The 5GH team also notices that researchers with high publication records are more likely to suffer from the problematic "Published Names" issues. However, this is not a cross-sectional study, the 5GH team can not tell prevalence of the problematic "Published Names" issues.
These cases demonstrate that the Clarivate profiles are unreliable to be used as a index to judge the academic outcomes for the researchers. The 5GH team urges Clarivate to fix this problem.
Reference
[1] webofscience.com/wos/author/record/55481551 (accessed on 2024-09-24)
