Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Who is OB Drive?

The other day, I looked up a published paper in Industrial and Corporate Change, which cited a recent publication by one professor in our strategy group, prof. Anne Marie Knott. The citation goes like this, "...Knott and Drive (2008)...", my immediate response is that who the heck is Drive? I am familiar with this paper and I am pretty sure that this is a single-author publication!!

Guess what? It turns out that this confusion is simply caused by the omnipotent search engine - Google Scholar! As you can see from here, the search result does look like that the paper is written by Knott and Drive. However, as I dig this a bit further (I simply typed in the keyword "OB Drive") , and from the search result, I could almost immediately explain what went wrong. Many academic papers whose authors are affiliated with Washington University suffer the same problem, because they all share the same critical attribute - their correspondence addresses are all listed as "One Brookings Drive"!!

If we could simply change this to "1 Brookings Drive", this problem might be resolved under the current algorithm of Google Scholar! See, here is at least "1" benefit of using numbers rather than words!!

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