  Research managers benchmarking universities against international peers face
the problem of affiliation disambiguation. Different databases have taken
separate approaches to this problem and discrepancies exist between them.
Bibliometric data sources typically conduct a disambiguation process that
unifies variant institutional names and those of its sub-units so that
researchers can then search all records from that institution using a single
unified name. This study examined affiliation discrepancies between Scopus, Web
of Science, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic for 18 Arab universities over a
five-year period. We confirmed that digital object identifiers (DOIs) are
suitable for extracting comparable scholarly material across databases and
quantified the affiliation discrepancies between them. A substantial share of
records assigned to the selected universities in any one database were not
assigned to the same university in another. The share of discrepancy was higher
in the larger databases, Dimensions and Microsoft Academic. The smaller, more
selective databases, Scopus and especially Web of Science tended to agree to a
greater degree with affiliations in the other databases. Manual examination of
affiliation discrepancies showed they were caused by a mixture of missing
affiliations, unification differences, and assignation of records to the wrong
institution.
