searching for education affiliations

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Sheila Rabun

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Jul 17, 2020, 6:20:36 PM7/17/20
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Hello,

I am trying to help a university get an idea of the number of graduate students who already have ORCID iDs at their institution. Is there a way to search within ORCID for just Education affiliations? Everything that I am seeing (for example http://members.orcid.org/api/resources/find-myresearchers) appears to group all affiliations together (education & employment). How can I search for just the institution name with the current education section of ORCID records?

Thanks,
Sheila

ow...@ostephens.com

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Jul 17, 2020, 6:56:20 PM7/17/20
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Hi Sheila,

As far as I'm aware there is no way of limiting the search to retrieve just those records with a specific type of affiliation. (very happy and interested if I'm wrong about this and someone can share a way of doing this)

I wrote a demonstration service that finds all the records affiliated to an institution and then extracts both education and employment details - it might help you

Once the full set of records have loaded there is an option to export the results as a CSV which you could use to then do the more fine grained analysis you need using an appropriate tool (e.g. OpenRefine)

Please note this application was written as a quick proof-of-concept at an event organised by Jisc (an organisation in the UK http://jisc.ac.uk) and has a number of limitations - for large lists of ORCIDs the whole thing can be slow (or fail). The application uses the public API so only finds information available via the public API.This also means it is limited to retrieving 11,000 ORCID records. The application only queries by affiliated institution using the Ringgold ID - I haven't implemented searching for affiliated accounts by searching for email domains

If the institution that you are helping are not in the UK or US lists of institutions in the application, you can do the query by putting the appropriate Ringgold ID on the end of this URL:

If the code behind the application could be useful to you this is available as well https://github.com/ostephens/orcid-node

Good luck

Owen

S.J. Rabun

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Jul 17, 2020, 7:32:23 PM7/17/20
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Thanks Owen, I have been using that app for US institutions and it is very helpful. The only issue in this specific case is that there are very few people with the Ringgold ID for this institution on their ORCID record, most affiliates have the GRID ID instead...so I'm looking for other ways to help this organization get an of their affiliated grad students with ORCID iDs...

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ow...@ostephens.com

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Jul 18, 2020, 8:34:57 AM7/18/20
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>The only issue in this specific case is that there are very few people with the Ringgold ID for this institution on their ORCID record, most affiliates have the GRID ID instead

Interesting - I hadn't realised that this would be different (I'd naively assumed that ORCID would map this behind the scenes and querying for the Ringgold and the GRID ID would be completely equivalent where a mapping existed!)

Because it was quick and easy to do, I've changed the code on the application so it will no accept either a Ringgold or a GRID ID as a search. So for example


Finds the ORCIDs for the University of Aberystwyth via the GRID ID (17 found - compared to https://powerful-chamber-19570.herokuapp.com/?ringgold=1026 which finds 804)

I've not added the list of the GRID IDs into the user interface so you'll have to just create the relevant URL for yourself

When I get time I'll do some work to make a single query do both ID types, but for now hopefully being able to do this via the URL will be sufficient for you (and others)

Best wishes

Owen

Pedro Costa

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Jul 20, 2020, 12:01:44 PM7/20/20
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Hi Sheila,

Thanks for posting this question.

At the moment it is not possible to search specifically for Education affiliations or Employment affiliations -- you'd get both kinds together when searching the indexed fields "affiliation-org-name", "ringgold-org-id" or "grid-org-id".

You can perform searches like the following:


What you could then do is grab the ORCID iDs from the search results and read their Education section:

https://api.[host]/[version]/[ORCID iD]/education

Please take a look at our search tutorial for more info: https://github.com/ORCID/ORCID-Source/blob/master/orcid-api-web/tutorial/search.md

We're working on improving the user experience when searching the ORCID Registry with cards such as: https://trello.com/c/E7NIde10/6871-search-make-it-clear-whether-affiliations-refers-to-previous-affiliations-too-5

Do let us know if you have any other questions!

Kind regards,

Sheila Rabun

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Jul 20, 2020, 1:47:34 PM7/20/20
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Thank you Pedro. Unfortunately I do not have the means to efficiently read the employment section from every single ORCID iD returned in an affiliation search (and I know that many institutions that do not have an API integration yet or devs to work on this kind of thing also don't have the means to do so). So, it would be great if ORCID could add an improvement to allow for searching one type of affiliation or another rather than lumping both together. The improvement to indicate past vs. current affiliations will also be a big help. 

For now I will use the search tool that Owen referred to with the new addition of GRID ID search to see if I can get some quick data that way.

Thanks,
Sheila

ow...@ostephens.com

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Jul 20, 2020, 7:06:45 PM7/20/20
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Sheila,

I've done a further update so you should now be able to use the app to search for Ringgold and GRID based affiliations at the same time. Again this isn't built into the UI but you can build the URL yourself. Using the Aberystwyth example again:


Will search for users affiliated to the Ringgold ID 1026 or GRID ID grid.8186.7 - both or which are Aberyswyth University, Wales
The total affiliated users with this search is 817 which is less than the combination of separate searches for Ringgold (804) and Grid (17), which means there are 4 people who are affiliated with both IDs

This was another quick fix so I though I may as well do it in case it was helpful

Owen

Sheila Rabun

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Jul 21, 2020, 11:19:02 AM7/21/20
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Thank you Owen, this is very helpful!

John Aspler

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Jul 22, 2020, 12:23:16 PM7/22/20
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Hi Owen and Sheila,

I'm delighted to learn that we can now search by Ringgold ID *and* GRID - and that the application successfully de-duplicates users across these IDs. Thank you so much for adding that functionality, Owen! It adds so much value for members - I'm seeing jumps as high as 50% more ORCID iDs in some cases, and usually between at least 15%-25%.

I wanted to follow-up on those changes to ask how feasible if it would be to make it so that someone could search for multiple Ringgold IDs simultaneously (with that same de-duplication we see in the combined Ringgold ID/GRID case above). As Monica flagged in the other discussion thread, there are many faculties, groups, and 'sub-institutions' that have their own Ringgold IDs (and technically may have GRIDs, too, though not below). 

I wanted to use the example of McGill University (a Canadian member with many associated sub-groups) to illustrate why this would be useful - and for anyone following this thread, to see how institutional affiliations work in ORCID. 
At the same time, McGill has a LOT of institutions that wholly belong to or are associated with them. When I type "McGill" into the "Add Employment" ORCID affiliation box, the dropdown menu includes a total of 10 hits: Ringgold, GRID, and Fundref (see comment below), as well as seven associated faculties/institutions (a strong skew toward STEM faculties, interestingly). Notably, this does not include other McGill institutions without McGill in the name (e.g., Montreal Neurological Institute): 
  1. McGill University Faculty of Medicine; Ringgold ID = 12367; Hits alone = 409;  Hits together with McGill overall GRID above = 1161. We can see a small overlap (8), given that the GRID provides 760 alone
  2. McGill University Health Centre; Ringgold ID = 54473; Hits alone = 246; Hits together with GRID = 996 (10 overlap)
    1. Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre; Ringgold ID = 507266; Hits alone = 37;  Hits together with GRID = 788 (9 overlap)
  3. McGill University Faculty of Science; Ringgold ID = 98613; Hits alone = 155; Hits together with GRID = 914 (1 overlap)
  4. McGill University Faculty of Engineering; Ringgold ID = 120491; Hits alone = 143; Hits together with GRID = 899 (4 overlap)
  5. McGill University Faculty of Agriculture and Environment; Ringgold ID = 151165; Hits alone = 65;  Hits together with GRID = 824 (1 overlap)
  6. McGill University Desautels Faculty of Management; Ringgold ID = 71632; Hits alone = 36; Hits together with GRID = 795 (1 overlap)
Without being able to account for any overlap that might exist across different Ringgold IDs at McGill, this appears to be a fairly significant number of potential ORCID users (in this case, possibly 869 above the 3869 listed above). It would be amazing to be able to capture those ORCID iDs as well :). 

Hope this example is helpful for folks reading these posts, and thanks so much for updating the application!

Best,

John

P.S. It is my understanding that more institutional identifiers will eventually be added (e.g., ROR), complicating this calculation. In fact, most institutions have a third listed ID in the ORCID repository beyond Ringgold and GRID: Fundref. This one is more complex: Fundref numbers are just Crossref DOIs with a special purpose (McGill's: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100008582), most institutions have numerous Fundref numbers (https://www.grid.ac/institutes/grid.14709.3b), and the primary Fundref number is already listed in GRID metadata details in ORCID. I would probably ignore this particular set of affiliations for now given the complexity, but maybe it's simpler than I think.

Perhaps someone from ORCID could confirm if this represents an entire third set of users in the ORCID Registry?

Pedro Costa

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Jul 24, 2020, 1:01:43 PM7/24/20
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Hi all,

Thank you for participating in this discussion!

I'd like to point you towards our blog post https://orcid.org/blog/2020/03/24/what-orcid-and-ror where we talk about our plans for implementing ROR, and the work we're doing to better manage the existence of various organization identifiers in the ORCID Registry. I hope you find this useful.

Kind regards,

Pedro Costa
QA & Support Specialist

John Aspler

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Aug 4, 2020, 4:13:50 PM8/4/20
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Hi All!

Just wanted to quickly follow-up on that question of multiple Ringgold IDs.

Thanks for the link regarding ROR, Pedro.

Best,

John

Owen Stephens

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Aug 17, 2020, 7:48:31 AM8/17/20
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Hi John

I've been on vacation the last couple of weeks - so apologies for the delay in responding. I think I could add the option to search multiple identifiers of the same type at the same time into my app - I'll investigate and post when I know more

Owen
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John Aspler

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Aug 19, 2020, 9:58:30 AM8/19/20
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Thanks Owen! I hope you enjoyed your vacation :).

Owen Stephens

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Aug 19, 2020, 12:25:49 PM8/19/20
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Hi All

Following the comments / requests from John and Sheila, I’ve now updated the app to support some extra stuff when searching for ORCID affiliations.
You can now search by any combination of:
* Ringgold ID
* GRID ID
* email domain (in the users public emails)
* affiliated organisation name

For each of these you can include multiple values in a pipe separated list. The pipe character looks like a vertical line: |

So for example, the following URL will search for all users who are:

Affiliated with Ringgold 3162 OR affiliated with GRID grid.4970a OR have an email which is @rhul.ac.uk  or have an affiliated organisation with the name “Royal Holloway, University of London” or “RHUL” (see the vertical pipe between “London” and “RHUL” in the URL - this means these are treated as two separate organisation names - organisation names should do exact matching I thinkg


I’ve not changed the interface at all so you have to build the URL yourself - but hopefully that all makes sense.

Owen

PS:

For those interested the query generated for the ORCID API by the app given the URL above is:


Because there are 1376 results (i.e. more than the 999 retrieved by this first query) this is followed up by another query which retrieves that next 1000 records:


Owen

Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting

John Aspler

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Sep 2, 2020, 5:12:30 PM9/2/20
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Hi Owen,

I ran into an interesting error (and thanks as well for sorting out the bad character issue). When I search for this Ringgold ID: https://powerful-chamber-19570.herokuapp.com/?ringgold=428121, it returns one hit. However, in the application, the connection to the university department in question (at Canada's University of Victoria) does not display in the results (on screen or in the downloaded Excel Sheet). 

If I go and search for this ORCID iD in the registry itself, I can see a much longer list of affiliations including UVic.

So, interestingly, the application is correctly identifying this ORCID iD as being connected to UVic; it's just not displaying the connection.

Best,

John
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