Wikidata:Property proposal/PubFacts author ID

PubFacts author ID

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Person

   Not done

Description	identifier for an author on the PubFacts website
Represents	PubFacts (Q107555574)
Data type	External identifier
Domain	item; human (Q5)
Allowed values	[A-Za-zÀ-ž\-\+]+
Example 1	Clemens Cabernard (Q47503516) → Clemens+Cabernard
Example 2	Lars Aabakken (Q52767738) → Lars+Aabakken
Example 3	Jyri-Johan Paakki (Q82827650) → Jyri-Johan+Paakki
Example 4	Daniel W. Pack (Q96093492) → Daniel+W+Pack
Example 5	Amy E. B. Packard (Q84354031) → Amy+E+Packard and Amy+Eb+Packard
Example 6	Ana Maria Waaga-Gasser (Q107555771) → Ana+Maria+Waaga-Gasser and Ana+M+Waaga-Gasser and Anna-Maria+Waaga-Gasser
Example 7	Esther Rodríguez González (Q107556076) → Esther+Rodríguez+Gonzalez
Source	https://www.pubfacts.com/authors
Mix'n'match	4611
Planned use	adding to items for University of Washington faculty and researchers
Expected completeness	always incomplete (Q21873886)
Formatter URL	https://www.pubfacts.com/author/$1
Applicable "stated in"-value	PubFacts (Q107555574)

Motivation

PubFacts (Q107555574) is a website whose goal is to bring together scientific and medical related data in one place, with in-depth data on over 20 million PubMed citations and scientific publication authors. PubFacts author pages include links to scientific publications by the person. Some authors have more than one PubFacts page because their name has been published in different forms (see examples 5 and 6 above). UWashPrincipalCataloger (talk) 07:08, 17 July 2021 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Support Mix'n'match catalog added (limited to 2K entries per initial letter). Gerwoman (talk) 15:44, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
•  Support Lectrician1 (talk) 16:18, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
  •  Oppose per UWashPrincipalCataloger's comments below. Lectrician1 (talk) 14:39, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Support Simon Cobb (User:Sic19 ; talk page) 19:59, 19 July 2021 (UTC)
•  Support, an important property for science.--Arbnos (talk) 17:19, 28 July 2021 (UTC)
•  Oppose This doesn't seem like an identifier, it is just going by the particular name spelling, right? See for example Arthur+Smith which mixes up an "Arthur R. Smith", "Arthur D. Smith", and presumably many others. If this is a useful source in some other way then just add the URL somehow. We can get into real trouble if an "identifier" indicates two people are the same when they are not. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:10, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

I do think this is an identifier, but it's a situation where the same person can have multiple IDs in one database. I am not aware if multiple people who have the same name have the same PubFacts author ID. It isn't unusual for entities to have the same identifier - this happens in Wikidata all the time. For example, the Library of Congress Subject Heading Publishers and publishing corresponds to two Wikidata items, one for the concept of publisher and the other for the activity of publishing. The same is true for the LCSH term Forests and forestry. If you don't want to think of the PubFacts author property as an ID, you could think of it as an access point to a database, which basically functions the same way as an ID. In library catalogs, the same person can be found under multiple access points. Not ideal, but it happens all the time. I could change the property to PubFacts author access point, but it would still be an external identifier. If the community thinks this would be better as PubFacts author URL, we could change it to that. I don't see much benefit of that, however. One would still have multiple values of URLs in some cases. UWashPrincipalCataloger (talk) 07:27, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

@UWashPrincipalCataloger: Jun Li has over 9000 publications. Seems unlikely. This isn't an identifier for individuals, at best it's an identifier for author name strings. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:06, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

•  Support — MasterRus21thCentury (talk) 10:50, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Oppose analysis by Arthur suggests that it's a search string, not an author identifier. --- Jura 16:29, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
• @Epìdosis: as you already worked on mixnmatch:4611 --- Jura 23:37, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
•  Oppose per ArthurPSmith. --Epìdosis 23:40, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

 Not done no consensus after several months of open discussion --Emu (talk) 20:02, 23 March 2022 (UTC)