Seeking use case advice: Group publication database

[Noam Ross]

Hi,

I have a Wordpress use-case that I'm looking for some advice on. I have a number of desired features, and I'm wondering if this group could recommend a stack of plugins to cover them.  I can potentially do some coding myself, but I'm new to Wordpress and PHP, and hope there are plugins or other options that can get most of the way.

I am putting together a website for my graduate program in which we'd like to have a database of scientific papers written by students, which would display on student (user) pages and also aggregated by year on another page.  Here's the functionality we're hoping for:

 - Maintain a database of publications

 - Allow users to enter their publications

    - Allow users to enter their publications using only a DOI, and lookup other information using this DOI (or PMID/URL)

 - Allow custom writing of citations, so, for instance, I can include widgets to lookup altmetrics based on DOI, and bold author names that match usernames (our students)

 - Allow custom fields, such as URLs for press coverage of a paper.

Another feature I'd like to have is the ability for a user to specify a URL for their personal website publication page, and scrape the DOIs from this page to populate the database. This way users don't have to enter their information twice - if they maintain a personal site the database on our site will be automatically updated. 

Currently, users are entering this information separately in a google form.  I run a local R script which:

  -  downloads the google spreadsheet this information as a CSV

  -  Scrapes the list of publication webpages for more DOIs using regex

  -  pings CrossRef to generate metadata for publications from DOIs (using ROpenSci's rmetadata package)

  -  Formats the citations and prints to an HTML file, which I upload manually to a wordpress page.  This is the result: http://egsa.ucdavis.edu/student-publications/

However, this system (1) can't generate publications for each author page, (2) requires the user leave the site to manage their publications, and (3) requires regular manual updating by the sysadmin.  I'd like to get most of this into Wordpress for a better user experience and a more sustainable workflow for future site admins.

So far in my search, it seems that teachPress allows users to manage publications as a database, but there is no field for DOI, no easy way to customize fields, in the publications and doesn't allow lookup. kcite does lookup but it's functionality seems limited to citing papers within posts.

Any thoughts on tools that could fill in some of the gaps, and perhaps the parts that would be most useful to others if I write them myself?

 

Thanks,

Noam Ross

Graduate Group in Ecology

Department of Environmental Science and Policy

University of California at Davis

+1.646.244.0484

http://www.noamross.net/

twitter: @noamross

[Fenner...@mh-hannover.de]

Noam,

while there are probably several approaches to this, I would recommend coordinating with the UC Davis library to figure out how much of this can be done in your institutional repository. With MacKenzie Smith you have a forward-thinking library director (among other things she is on the rOpenSci advisory board, and she used to be on the ORCID board), and you could use Wordpress for the final step, displaying the publications stored in the UC Davis Repository.

Another piece of the this could be ORCID, as you could pull in publications from ORCID profiles into Wordpress via their public API. I want to do something similar for my blog that I have moved to jekyll last month, but the idea is the same. I see that you have also integrated with ImpactStory, and their service also integrates with ORCID.

For citation formatting I would recommend Citation-Style Language, the kcite Wordpress plugin would be one way of doing this.

Best,

Martin

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