How are researchers unified/disambiguated in Dimensions?

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.

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.

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 check-box next to each researcher in the search filter, and then click "Add to search" at the bottom of the filters (see screenshot).

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).

You can suggest edits to a researcher profile. After selecting a researcher from the filter, click the View Profile link beneath their name.

On their profile page, select "Suggest Edits."

You can suggest an edit to modify the following information on a researcher profile:

• Creating a new profile

• Changing a researcher name on a profile

• Adding publications or grants to a profile

• Removing publications or grants from a profile

• Merging multiple profiles together

• Splitting a single profile into multiple profiles

Note that researcher profile affiliations are automatically assigned based on recent publications or funded grants in Dimensions.

After curation, it takes time for the updated profiles to become visible in Dimensions. Updates to a profile's publications are generally available in about two weeks. Updates to a profile's grants may take up to seven weeks. We recommend checking the profile after this period to confirm your requested updates.

If your organization has a Dimensions subscription, please contact the Dimensions support team for information about curating multiple profiles.