We take a combination of multiple variables into account when algorithmically aggregating publications or grants into author profiles, including, for example:
- existing person IDs,
- name variants,
- affiliation data,
- research topics,
- journals,
- co-authors, and
- active years.
Why do some researchers have multiple profiles?
Person disambiguation in Dimensions is naturally conservative; this means that, where there is any doubt about whether two name (and related affiliation) variants are the same people or not, we will not merge them, as we believe it is better to try and ensure that two people are not combined when they should not be, even if this means that a researcher may end up with several profiles in Dimensions, or that some publications, grants, data sets, patents or clinical trials are not matched to any profile.
Keep your ORCID profile up to date
The technology and data sources we are using to disambiguate authors are improving all the time. As we are also taking information from ORCID into account, a well maintained ORCID profile - which needs to be set to 'public' - significantly increases the probability that related profiles will automatically be merged (changes made to the list of works on the ORCID profile, however, are not directly feeding into Dimensions).
Request manual curation of a profile
In certain cases, we may be able to merge or split profiles manually, or add missing / remove erroneous publications or grants to/from a profile. If you'd like us to do this, please submit a support ticket, providing us with the link(s) to the Dimensions researcher profile(s) in question, ideally along with a list of the DOIs of the publications, and / or the titles and funders of the grants to be added/removed (note though that we can only add publications or grants which are already in Dimensions).
Including multiple profiles for the same person in a search
If you are searching for a person in Dimensions and find that there is more than one researcher profile for that person you can combine these for the purposes of your search by using the "OR" search functionality. Simply select the circular check-box next to each researcher in the search filter, and then click "limit to" at the bottom of the filters (see screenshot).
