Geoinference of Author Affiliations using NLP-based Text Classification

Abstract Author affiliations are essential in bibliometric studies, requiring relevant information extraction from free-text affiliations. Precisely determining an author's location from their affiliation is crucial for understanding research networks, collaborations, and geographic distribution. Existing geoparsing tools using regular expressions have limitations due to unstructured and ambiguous affiliations, resulting in erroneous location identification, especially for unconventional variations or misspellings. Moreover, their inefficient handling of big datasets hampers large-scale bibliometric studies. Though machine learning-based geoparsers exist, they depend on explicit location information, creating challenges when detailed geographic data is absent. To address these issues, we developed and evaluated a natural language processing model to predict the city, state, and country from an author's free-text affiliation. Our model automates location inference, overcoming drawbacks of existing methods. Trained and tested with MapAffil, a publicly available geoparsed dataset of PubMed affiliations up to 2018, our model accurately retrieves high-resolution locations, even without explicit mentions of a city, state, or even country. Leveraging NLP techniques and the LinearSVC algorithm, our machine learning model achieves superior accuracy based on several validation datasets. This research demonstrates a practical application of text classification for inferring specific geographical locations from free-text affiliations, benefiting researchers and institutions in analyzing research output distribution.