To affirm what Eric and Tom said, we use BibApp but collecting publication data and disambiguating authors is a huge, person-intensive chore. And that's speaking as a small-ish medical center that can rely on PubMed to source 80-90% of our data.

We're hoping that ORCID will make a big difference. We're just getting ready to push our verified publication data to ORCID profiles for our researchers.

Cornell has done some work on author-name disambiguation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44PVULsDk24

Jason Stirnaman, MLS
Biomedical Librarian, Digital Projects and Research

A.R. Dykes Library
University of Kansas Medical Center

-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Eric Larson
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2013 2:32 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Faculty publication database

Hi all,

I was the lead developer for BibApp at UW-Madison.  BibApp is a neat tool and worth consideration for Ruby/Solr folk.

However, the project lost momentum at UW because we could not capture enough data to approach faculty expectations that the database be _truly comprehensive_.  We harvested citation data via APIs, collected paper CVs, brokered our way into obtaining copies of annual merit review exercises, but still we could not capture enough publication data.  Ultimately, seeing the amount of staff cost for data collection, for building a non-comprehensive tool, the library decided to back away.

In the sciences you'll have far better luck, but in the humanities it's a complete mess.  Good luck finding citations for all the public radio appearances the Chair of the English department expects to see on their profile...

It's an unwinnable war.  I still cry at night.

Cheers,
- Eric



On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Michael J. Giarlo < [log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Have you looked at VIVO yet?  http://vivoweb.org/
>
> It's an open-source project that was initially developed by Cornell 
> and is now being incubated by DuraSpace.
>
> -Mike
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Alevtina Verbovetskaya < 
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Hi guys,
> >
> > Does your library maintain a database of faculty publications? How 
> > do you do it?
> >
> > Some things I've come across in my (admittedly brief) research:
> > - RSS feeds from the major databases
> > - RefWorks citation lists
> >
> > These options do not necessarily work for my university, made up of 
> > 24 colleges/institutions, 6,700+ FT faculty, and 270,000+ 
> > degree-seeking students.
> >
> > Does anyone have a better solution? It need not be searchable: we 
> > are
> just
> > interested in pulling a periodical report of articles written by our 
> > faculty/students without relying on them self-reporting 
> > days/weeks/months/years after the fact.
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Allie
> >
> > --
> > Alevtina (Allie) Verbovetskaya
> > Web and Mobile Systems Librarian
> > Office of Library Services
> > City University of New York
> > 555 W 57th St, Ste. 1325
> > New York, NY 10019
> > 1-646-313-8158
> > [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]
> > du>
> >
>