(was Re: measuring affiliation)
The EPrints team have been looking at this issue in some detail. The current
version of EPrints has "clone" and "new version" options which save having
to re-enter metadata for similar/different versions of an existing deposit.
However, this doesn't help much if you are starting a new deposit. The
approach we've been favouring of late is auto-completion (like Google
Suggest
http://labs.google.com/suggest), whereby the depositor begins typing
the first few characters of the name of a co-author and is presented with a
pop-up list of suggestions. The behind-the-scenes logic that determines what
to suggest can be customised to an individual repository's requirements e.g.
suggest from the list of registered users, suggest by looking up in the
institutions user account (e.g. LDAP) server, suggest according to an
internal database list of institutional and non-institutional users. The
previous deposits that you have made can also inform the list of suggestions
e.g. frequent/recent co-authors can be promoted to the top of the list of
suggestions.
This is not just about minimising keystrokes - the suggestion mechanism we
implemented is also able to carry additional data about the authors being
suggested. You mention the potential for cross-linking an author's work
between archives. In order to do this you need to be able to uniquely
identify them. Author disambiguation is potentially important for the
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK. When an author's name is
autocompleted, the ID of that author is also attached.
We have also successfully applied the auto-completion technique to keywords
and journal names (with the ISSN number of the journal being passed with the
suggestion and used to auto-fill the ISSN field upon selection of the
intended journal by the user).
Although for the moment we've decided not to include it in the next version
of EPrints (3.0), it will be in a future version. In the meantime, I'd be
happy to describe our technique in more technical detail on the eprints.org
wiki if that would be useful (creating an autocompleting field in the
EPrints deposit form using an open source AJAX library is straightforward-
the complicated bit comes in designing the (independent) program that makes
appropriate and useful suggestions in reponse to the user's keystrokes).
It is also worth noting that EPrints 3.0 will have a number of new options
for importing data e.g. users can create new deposits by cutting and pasting
BibTeX/EndNote/etc entries from a bibliography file into a textbox and
hitting a button.
Tim
--
Timothy Miles-Board
EPrints Services
Southampton, UK tmb_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://www.eprints.org/services/
Consultancy - Training - Hosting
On Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:08:58 +0100, Andrew A. Adams
<a.a.adams_at_READING.AC.UK> wrote:
>Regarding this note, one of the things we're struggling with in setting up a
>pilot of an IR at the University of Reading (the School of Systems
>Engineering and the School of Maths, Meteorology and Physics are jointly
>piloting an IR for the Univrsity) is that of manually inputting local
>institutional co-authors. It's one of the weaknesses, IMHO, of the GNU
>eprints software that it doesn't have two methods of author input - selection
>from a list of institutional users already registered, and free text input of
>non-institutional authors. In fact, even with non-institutional authors, it's
>quite common to regularly author joint papers with the same
>non-co-institutional a number of times, if one has a productive external
>collaboration. I would prefer, rather than manually entering each author name
>in free text, to have a search system available for "registered authors" not
>all of whom need to be registered users of the system (which deals with the
>issue of people leaving institutions and stopping being registered users but
>remaining as authors for their prior papers). If a new co-author is to be
>entered, then minimising the number of keystrokes and the utility of having
>more than just free-text name-entry only available, though not neceesarily
>mandated, should be considered. As the IR grows then, if it is deemed useful,
>people can be employed to add extra information onto the non-user author
>details, such as affiliation at the time the paper was deposited, and
>possibly cross-links to other IRs containing the works of that author (which
>could also be useful for authors moving between institutions).
>
>
>--
>*E-mail*a.a.adams_at_rdg.ac.uk******** Dr Andrew A Adams
>**snail*27 Westerham Walk********** School of Systems Engineering
>***mail*Reading RG2 0BA, UK******** The University of Reading
>****Tel*+44-118-378-6997*********** Reading, United Kingdom
Received on Fri Aug 18 2006 - 15:37:13 BST