Author name disambiguation is a type of disambiguation and record linkage applied to the names of individual people. The process could, for example, distinguish individuals with the name "John Smith". An editor may apply the process to scholarly documents where the goal is to find all mentions of the same author and cluster them together. Authors of scholarly documents often share names which makes it hard to distinguish each author's work. Hence, author name disambiguation aims to find all publications that belong to a given author and distinguish them from publications of other authors who share the same name.