The Joy of Search Terms

Over the many years I've been performing and supporting user searches in on-line databases I've seen examples of many kinds of search and index term that cause problems for basic searching and require knowledge of how the search system process the query and matches the resulting terms to those in the indexes. 

ORCID

Anyone interested in ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) might find the following useful:

• Ten things you need to know about ORCID right now
• ORCID: Connecting Research and Researchers
• Federated identity and scholarly identity - a match made in heaven?

Note that while ORCID is currently targeting researchers (because they are already aware of the author identity problem), a longer term intent is to be able to use ORCID as a general author identifier. This dovetails with the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) mission to provide persistent and unambiguous identifiers for people and organisations. ORCID and ISNI have a collaboration which ensures that ORCID and ISNI use the same identifier format, and do not issue the same number to different people (see ORCID and ISNI Joint Statement on Interoperation).

More resources concerning ORCID can be found on figshare,com (ORCID tagged documents) or on the ORCID website in the News section (aka. the ORCID blog).

Merging Works on ORCID

When importing works from multiple sources into an ORCID profile, occasionally the sources providing the details of the works do not provide the identifiers required for the records to be collapsed into a single entry for display. This leads to the appearance of duplicate works in the list, with different details, which is a little confusing and not really what we want.

It turns out that there is a simple workaround to get these duplicates to collapse as expected.

Since the collapse of works is triggered by the presence of shared identifiers, all that is needed is an entry for each duplicated work that contains identifiers for each of the displayed duplicates. In my case this has turned out to be a manual entry containing the Scopus EID and the DOI. This can easily be created by using the "Make copy and edit" on one of the entries for the work (I have been using the Scopus entries, so the EID is already present) and having previously copied the DOI associated with the other entries for the work, just add the DOI to the copy of the Scopus entry and "Add to list". The updated display should now show the instances of the work grouped together.

If you want to display all the associated identifiers for the work, you can add these to your manual record for the work, and choose the manual entry as the "Preferred source".

Updating a Scopus Author Id

Elsevier's Scopus automatically creates author identifiers based on author names and affiliations (see Scopus Author Identifier for details). This usually works reasonably well at identifying an author and tracking their publications, but sometimes gets mislead. In order to let authors correct the set of publications associated with their author identifier Scopus provides a mechanism to update the set of publications associated with an author identifier (note: this does not require a Scopus account):

1. Go to Scopus (http://www.scopus.com/)
2. Click on the "Author Preview" link near the bottom of the main text
3. Perform a search for yourself using your name. While an ORCID can be used this depends on publications being assigned to an ORCID already.
4. This returns a list of Scopus author profiles, each of which corresponds to a Scopus author identifier. Ideally one of these will obviously be you, with both name and affiliation being what you expect. If this is not the case you need to identify which author profile has your publications.
1. To see the publications associated with an author profile, click on the first name listed for the author, or the count of publications associated with the author.
5. Once you have identified your author profile, look through the associated publications and ensure they are all yours. If there are publications from another author click the "Request author detail corrections" link in the right hand sidebar near the top.
6. This starts a wizard style process which allows you to choose the name for the author profile, and select which publications should be associated with it. As part of the process you will be sent e-mails updating you on the progress of the changes.

NB. In my case when the "Request Complete" e-mail arrived from Scopus, the author profile in Scopus was updated, but the summary information presented when searching for an author was not. Waiting a couple of hours for this to catch-up made things much easier and a bit less confusing.

Once the Scopus author identifier profile has been updated, you can then associate an ORCID with the Scopus author identifier and allow Scopus to add publications to your ORCID profile automatically. This process can be configured using the Scopus to ORCID wizard available from your ORCID profile ("Works" -> "Add works" -> "Search and link" -> "Scopus to ORCID") or from your Scopus author profile ("Add to ORCID" in the right hand sidebar).