Populating the Publications Database

There are several methods of entering data into the Publications System. Originally School secretaries entered publications 'by hand'. In January 2008, the system was significantly modified to interrogate remote systems and harvest publications.

For any given member of staff the system can interrogate PubMed and the WoS. If the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or IVIP data (ISSN, Volume, Issue, Page) are known, CrossRef can also be interrogated. The system locates articles that belong to the University of Birmingham in remote systems by using the "affiliation" field stored in both WoS and PubMed. It does so by specifying that the word "Birmingham" and various Birmingham postcodes (B15, B5 etc) be included in the articles' institutional affiliation. While this method is not foolproof it correctly identifies a very high percentage of correct entries.

Manual Entry of Data

Once an article is located in these external databases, the system checks the DOI, PubMed ID, WoS unique tag and the IVIP data to determine whether the article is already in the Publications System. If not, it allows the user to import the article. When an article is imported, the system determines whether each author is a member of Birmingham's staff, research student or external author. Various factors are used to determine whether the staff member or student is likely to be the author of the incoming publication. For example, the system checks whether the author (or his/her immediate colleagues) has previously published in the journal and if the journal covers fields, e.g. conservative dentistry, in which the staff member has had papers previously published.

The system displays the information to the user to allow human confirmation to resolve any possible ambiguities e.g. name being 'SNR Bolton' in the Staff System but appearing as 'SN Bolton' in the incoming author record. Once the user is satisfied that they have a match for the member of staff/student, they can confirm the import into the Publications Database. If an article is jointly authored by more than one member of staff, the article is automatically attributed to both members of staff.

The system automatically locates as many unique IDs for an article as possible. For example, when an article is imported from WoS, the system will try to locate the same article in PubMed and CrossRef, and, if found, will automatically import the PubMed ID and DOI. Any other data missing from the original source (page numbers, ISSN, full author list) are, as much as possible, completed from the other data sources. Publications which cannot be found in CrossRef, WoS or PubMed are entered manually.

Automated Import of a publication from Web of Science (WoS)