Abstract
Online accounts to keep track of scientific publications, such as Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) or Google Scholar, can be time consuming to maintain and synchronize. Furthermore, the open access status of publications is often not easily accessible, hindering potential opening of closed publications. To lessen the burden of managing personal profiles, we developed a R shiny app that allows publication lists from multiple platforms to be retrieved and consolidated, as well as interactive exploration and comparison of publication profiles. A live version can be found at pubassistant.ch.
Highlights
Given the increasing number of both researchers and publications as well as publishing modes,[1,2] it becomes a challenge to identify and consolidate all publications from a single author
Automatic synchronization of accounts for different identifiers can be hindered by the fact that different document identifiers are used, such as DOI (Digital Object Identifier) or the independent identifier used by Google Scholar
Publications are retrieved from the specified sources and combined into a table based on the DOI or, in case of publications from Google Scholar, based on matching of titles and/or metadata retrieval from Zotero (Zotero translator, i.e. web scraping)[14] or Crossref.[15]
Summary
Given the increasing number of both researchers and publications as well as publishing modes,[1,2] it becomes a challenge to identify and consolidate all publications from a single author. There does not exist a free tool that allows researchers to interactively explore their publication metadata across multiple platforms, together with the open access status of each publication Commercial tools exist, such as Elements (from the company Symplectic10) or Dimensions, but they are intended for institutional use. To facilitate overview and synchronization of publication records, we provide a web-based application that allows publications for an author to be retrieved from different sources, combines entries, checks for duplicates and downloads citations to update records across platforms. The open access status of each publication is provided, which can help to select publications that could be “greened” (i.e., depositing documents in institutional repositories) Taken together, this allows researchers to organize their public publication profiles and to interactively explore the accuracy of records across the various entry points
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