At the end of March 2020 dblp provides bibliographies for almost 2.5 million scientists. With this number, it is not surprising that we have namesakes – scientists with the exact same name. For historical reasons, all persons in dblp must have different names. We circumvent this problem by assigning numeric suffixes to names that are not unique. E.g., there are multiple Thomas Müller in dblp. So we name them Thomas Müller 0001, Thomas Müller 0002 and so on. See our FAQ here for more details.

Identifying authors with the same name is a  very important task. For example, the bibliography of Thomas Müller 0001 should not list papers by another Thomas Müller. This is a very common problem. I recently removed a wrongly assigned dblp person identifier from the Wikidata record of Bayern Munich soccer player Thomas Müller. We invest a lot of resources into handling scientists with identical names. In March 2020, the total number of bibliographies with a numeric suffix (e.g., 0001) is 38,822. Disambiguation suffixes were used for 9664 different base names such as Thomas Müller. The base name with the most different numeric suffixes (i.e., identified authors) is Wei Wang. You can see the 223 identified authors for this base name here (you might need to extend the ‘Other persons with a similar name’ tab). Below, you can see how the number of bibliographies with a suffix and the number of base names developed. The strong increase caused by increased funding of our infrastructure and most of all because of data provided via ORCID.

In March 2020 there are 450,859 publications in dblp where at least one author has a disambiguation suffix (that is 9% of all publications in dblp). The publication with the most authors with numeric suffix is this (13 authors have a numeric suffix)

If you have a common name or you know that there is another researcher with the same name and we have mixed the publications up: contact us with a list of your publications so we can create a clean bibliography for you.