Researcher disambiguation: full rebuild rolling out from 28 September

We are rolling out a full rebuild of the researcher disambiguation in Dimensions. Previous updates were incremental and only affected newly processed records. This release re-runs the algorithm across the entire database, so all improvements apply uniformly to historical and new records alike.

What changes

• Publications: around 57 million publications will have updated researcher assignments. 17 million of these previously had no resolved researcher and are now linked to at least one.

• Researchers: around 20 million researcher records receive updated metadata (e.g. name correction, current organization) or a revised set of associated documents.

• Researcher IDs: around 6 million researcher IDs are merged or split. Obsolete IDs redirect to their successor record, so existing links and API lookups continue to resolve. Around 2 million IDs are removed entirely (invalid assignments or profiles now linked to a single document).

The rebuild was validated against verified profiles and an external benchmark. Recall improves while precision remains stable.

Rollout schedule

Due to the volume of changes, the update is applied in stages during October:

• Publications: from the week of 28 September, processed in daily batches over approximately two weeks.

• Grants and Patents: from the week of 5 October. Patents are processed progressively and will be complete by the end of October.

• Clinical Trials and Reports: from the week of 12 October.

• Datasets: from the week of 19 October.

• Private instances: during October.

All content types are expected to be updated by the end of October. The web application and the API reflect each update as soon as it is applied, so researcher assignments may temporarily differ between content types during this period. Dimensions on Google BigQuery will receive the updated researcher data in mid-October.

What to expect

If you have saved researcher IDs, redirected IDs will continue to work in the web application and the API. If you notice a researcher profile that looks incorrect after the update, registered users can suggest a correction directly from the researcher profile in Dimensions. Suggestions are reviewed by our curation team, with a target turnaround of two weeks.