1. A method, executed by a computing system, for assigning publications to authors, the method comprising: for each of a plurality of publications, generating an author-name-mention data structure for each author name listed on the publication, the author-name-mention data structure comprising at least an identifier of the publication and the listed author name; associating, with each of the author-name-mention data structures, a feature set derived from the publication identified in the author-name-mention data structure; automatically clustering the author-name-mention data structures, at least in part based on comparison between the feature sets, to form a plurality of clusters each representing a disambiguated cluster author and containing one or more publications within the cluster; for a selected individual, searching one or more databases to identify social contacts of the selected individual; searching the one or more databases to automatically identify, among unassigned ones of the plurality of clusters and a plurality of author identities uniquely representing the selected individual's social contacts within the computing system, pairs of a cluster and an author identity name-compatible with the disambiguated cluster author of the cluster; and searching the one or more databases to detect, for at least one of the pairs of a cluster and a name-compatible author identity, at least one publication within the cluster that is at least one of co-authored by the selected individual or cited in a publication authored or co-authored by the selected individual, suggesting the at least one pair of a cluster and a name-compatible author identity representing one of the selected individual's social contacts as a candidate match to the selected individual with a request for confirmation that the social contact represented by the author identity is the disambiguated cluster author of the cluster, and, following receipt of the requested confirmation, assigning the cluster to the name-compatible author identity based at least in part on the confirmation.