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Automatic normalization of author names is not exact. Hence it is clear that manual intervention based on human knowledge is required to perfect algorithmic results. ACM is meeting this challenge, continuing to work to improve the automated merges by tweaking the weighting of the evidence in light of experience.

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The more conservative the merging algorithms, the more bits of evidence are required before a merge is made, resulting in greater precision but lower recall of works for a given Author Profile. Many bibliographic records have only author initials. Many names lack affiliations. With very common family names, typical in Asia, more liberal algorithms result in mistaken merges.

ACM will expand this edit facility to accommodate more types of data and facilitate ease of community participation with appropriate safeguards. In particular, authors or members of the community will be able to indicate works in their profile that do not belong there and merge others that do belong but are currently missing.

A direct search interface for Author Profiles will be built.

An institutional view of works emerging from their faculty and researchers will be provided along with a relevant set of metrics.

For more information, please visit zhaoyang.

It is possible, too, that the Author Profile page may evolve to allow interested authors to upload unpublished professional materials to an area available for search and free educational use, but distinct from the ACM Digital Library proper. It is hard to predict what shape such an area for user-generated content may take, but it carries interesting potential for input from the community.