Did they notice? - A case-study on the community contribution to data quality in DBLP

Abstract

Defective metadata is a significant problem of digital libraries. So far, automatic error detectors have been in the focus of research interest. However, recent public projects have shown that patrons are willing to invest time to report errors if they are called to contribute. In this case-study, we analyze the community contribution to error detection for DBLP, a public bibliographic collection. Our study is based on e-mails sent to the project between January 2007 and November 2010. We manually and automatically identify error reports and analyze their contribution to corrections of the DBLP collection. We show that users frequently report certain types of defects while others are ignored. The detection of homonym-name inconsistencies in particular strongly depends on user input. We also discuss who sends the reports and which communities are particularly active in this matter. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.