Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records
Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking
shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may
turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String
matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings
appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails
to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse,
many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and
"Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has
little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent
employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these
problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount
of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The
first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from
character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational
name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching
metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach
identifies relationships between organization names using network
representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and
second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in
applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software
("LinkOrgs").