Populating the Research Publications Database

A major challenge was to make the system into the core corporate system that was used throughout the University. The information had been held at Departmental/School level in a number of different formats - Excel, Word, Endnote and others.

In order to encourage uptake of the central system a number of import mechanisms were developed to take information from some of these sources. Additionally interfaces to PubMed (an archive of life science journals) and Thomson Reuters Web of Science (WoS) were also developed to enable any unmatched publications to be imported.

For members of University staff the publications database can be accessed via their staff portal. It is expected that members of academic staff will be responsible for maintaining their own publications data. (For academics who have left the University and other exceptional circumstances there is a 'super user' facility whereby research officers can 'impersonate' academics and update their publications records for them.)

Where a publication is jointly authored by more than one academic member of staff the member that enters the information is deemed to be the 'owner'. Though the co-author(s) can see the entry and it will appear in their profile(s), the owner is the only one allowed to change the content of the entry.

If the object exists in an external source such as WoS etc. the academic can opt to automatically import much of the required content:

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are entered by the academic or the Research Policy Office. Once included in the system a link to www.doi.org enables the academic to check that the DOI resolves properly.

An application was developed to match article title and journal against the information held at www.doi.org for outputs that did not contain a DOI. If a match was found the DOI was extracted and added to the record for that output, if it cannot be resolved then it is looked up at CrossRef via the Journal, Volume, issue etc. This type of resolution was carried out by the systems group rather than academics.

The system allows the user to select publication type, and Journal name from drop down lists. If the journal is not in the list the user can add it:

They then enter the paper title, issue, volume, month pagination. The user can also enter the abstract. The authors can also select whether the entry is to be displayed on their personal webpage: