Publication database backend for academic web sites

Question

My institution currently tracks its members' publications by sending them an email every six months and then manually compiling publication lists from the replies. I am looking into updating the organisation's web site, and I would like to implement a system where users can maintain their own publication list on their academic web page. This data should go into a central database, so that we can (for example) easily pull up the last six months' worth of new publications for reporting purposes.

My question is whether there is a standard solution to this problem: is there any free or commercially available software that will allow us to set up a user-editable publication list system with a database backend?

If it's relevant, we're looking at using Wordpress as the backend for the whole site, with one of the many "user profile" plugins being used to create the individual personal pages. (This is all being done on a shoe string budget.)

Answer 1

This sounds like a job for an institutional repository (though you don't have to publicise its existence as such...)

The two most commonly used open-source packages for repositories are ePrints and D-Space, though there's a few others. Anecdotally, D-Space is somewhat more complex to set up than ePrints, though I've only got experience of the latter.

Both have comparable levels of functionality, including metadata feeds/export, and it should be easy enough to export material into a Wordpress site - I've certainly seen it done, for example in this rough proof-of-concept. I'll see if I can find a more polished example.

Answer 2

A commercial service designed to solve this problem is Epistemio Outcomes. Users can maintain their publication list, in most cases, by just confirming results of an automatic search. The publications of scientists within an institution are aggregated into the institutional list of publications, with automatic deduplication. Aggregation is automated, therefore no more emailing and manual compilation of lists from the replies will be needed. Scientists may embed their own list of publications on their personal pages, while the institution may also embed the aggregated list on its page. The lists of publications can be exported at any time, in a variety of formats, for reporting purposes.

Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Epistemio.

Answer 3

If you are not opposed to using Elsevier / Mendeley, there is a very nice Mendeley Plugin for WordPress.

You can maintain your publication list in Mendeley and can easily build publication lists by using WordPress shortcodes, such as

[mendeley type="groups" id="XXXXX" filter="author=XXXX" sortby="year" sortorder="desc" groupby="year"]

Through the filter attribute, you can build different lists from the same Mendeley group, e.g. based on the author, year, tags, to name a few.

An example for a publication list built with the plugin can be found here (archive.org link).

Answer 4

Nobody in academia is really a fan of Elsevier, but they have a product called Pure that provides a fairly comprehensive solution for tracking research activities, including publications but also conference attendance, grants, collaborations, etc. I've used it as a faculty member at my current institution (it is used by all Danish universities) and my experience has been positive from that perspective.