The Challenges of Transliteration of Persian Names to English, and their Impact on the Recall of Web of Science’s Retrieved Results

Abstract

The present study investigated the challenges of transliteration of Persian names to English ones, and the impact of these challenges on the recall of web of science’s retrieved results. This study is applied in terms of objectives and quantitative (i.e., survey) in terms of data collection procedure. The population included the names of Iranian authors who had published an English article in Web of Science between 2010 and 2017. First of all, 3110873 names were retrieved. It reduced to 11,242 after homogenization process. Data was collected through Bibexcel and Excel software and Web of Science database. The findings showed that there were three types of challenges (i.e., vowels, consonants, and omitted or double consonants) in transliteration of Persian names to English ones; they resulted in non-homogenous and different written forms. In addition, the results of Chi-square test showed that the frequency of all forms of the mentioned challenges had a significant effect on the recall of the retrieved results. Considering the importance of retrieving the names in retrieval studies as well as research studies’ evaluation, some solutions, such as the using Boolean operators and wildcards between the prevailing typographical forms, creating Persian soundex, and equipping the database with the thesaurus, are suggested

Keywords

• recall
• information retrieval
• studies’ evaluation
• transliteration of persian names to english
• names transliteration challenges