refsplitr

Author name disambiguation, author georeferencing, and mapping of coauthorship networks with Web of Science data.

scientometrics

bibliometrics

Science of Science

metascience

name disambiguation

coauthorship

collaboration

georeferencing

Web of Science

refsplitr (v1.0) is an R package to parse and organize reference records downloaded from the Web of Science citation database, disambiguate the names of authors, geocode their locations, and generate/visualize coauthorship networks. The Web of Science (WOS) is a toll-access literature and citation database maintained by Clarivate Analytics that indexes articles from ~12,000 academic journals. WOS records include a diversity of data about each article (e.g., article title, journal name, author names, author addresses, number of times the article has been cited, funding sources), making them very useful for studying patterns of scientific productivity, coauthorship, research impact, and other Science of Science topics. Because bulk WOS records and API access to the WOS are very expensive, researchers at WOS-subscribing institutions often gather data by conducting WOS searches and downloading reference records in batches. However, this requires a cumbersome process of extracting, merging, and correcting data from the downloaded records prior to conducting any analyses. refsplitr will rapidly merge and process reference data files downloaded from the WOS, and then process and organize them in a format amenable for use in scientometric, social network, and Science of Science analyses.

Support for the development of refsplitr was provided by grants from the University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies and the University of Florida Informatics Institute. You can download the refsplitr package here.