EPrints and PlumX
PlumX Dashboards integrates with EPrints, an open source repository, allowing us to populate your PlumX Dashboard with:
- Your organizational hierarchy
- Your publications (which we call “artifacts” in PlumX)
- Usage from your EPrints repository
In addition, you can embed an author search URL in a researcher’s PlumX profile, which allows us to import artifacts directly associated to your researcher.
Organizational Hierarchy Replication
One of the first things we do is work with you to determine if your community list/organizational hierarchy in EPrints is what you’d like to use to organize your artifacts in PlumX. If the hierarchy is sufficient, we will crawl it and use it in your site. If you wish to use a custom hierarchy, your PlumX implementation specialist can provide you with a spreadsheet template for you to add your hierarchy, reseachers, and other additional information.
Once we bring in your organizational hierarchy, you will be able to compare the metrics for each level of the hierarchy against each another (e.g., compare the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences to the College of Geosciences). You can compare them through the Subgroups Overview Report in PlumX Dashboard. The Subgroups Overview provides a view into each subgroup for your organization across our five metrics categories, creating a powerful benchmarking opportunity.
The Subgroups Overview report is purposely generically named and is based on where in the hierarchy you are currently located. It is often best used at least one level down from the highest level in your PlumX subgroups to get you the closest to comparing “like to like.” For example, consider the following top-level subgroups:
Each of these subgroups has their own subgroups below them, so a common use case would be to explore the results for each, such as for “Schools and Programs.”
After navigating to that level, the next step would be to click on the Analytics icon and then click on Subgroups Overview to see the results. For the “Usage” category, the Veterinary Integrative Biosciences group has the most usage compared to the other schools in that college:
Repository Harvesting
Our preferred method in harvesting your artifacts is exporting Eprint metadata in EP3 XML format. We do this by:
- Running searches by date range (for example, 1800-1900, 1901-2000, 2001-2002, 2002-2003, etc.)
- Exporting the results in EP3 XMLProcessing, the results against our mappings
- For ongoing data, we query daily by date to look for new records added, then output those in EP3 XML format. Please check our mappings to determine if adjustments need to be made on your end for the scraping of your EPrints metadata
If there are DOIs in your records, we look for them in the following fields:
- <relatedURL><item><url> elements (in full URL format) with <type>doi</type>, as shown in the following snippet
<related_url>
<item>
<url>http:
//dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.5b02587</url>
<type>doi</type>
<description>Article</description>
</item>
<item>
<url>http:
//pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b02587</url>
<type>pub</type>
<description>Article</description>
</item>
</related_url>
Content Type Mapping
We will compare your ePrints content types with our artifact types and add new types as needed.
EPrints Type | PlumX Artifact Type |
---|---|
Published Article | ARTICLE |
Book Section | BOOK_CHAPTER |
Book | BOOK |
Conference Item OR Proceedings | CONFERENCE_PAPER |
Discussion Paper OR Policy Paper OR Review Essay Subject OR Working Paper | PAPER |
Pre-print | PRE_PRINT |
Monograph | REPORT |
Book Review | REVIEW |
Teaching Resource | SYLLABUS |
Thesis Degree | THESIS_DISSERTATION |
Performance | OTHER |
Usage Statistics
We support harvesting usage statistics from EPrints’ IRstats2 API, found here:http://eprints.github.io/irstats2/api.html, which we attempt to harvest daily. If you need assistance to set this up on your end, please let us know.
Updating Researcher Profile with Artifacts
You can easily link a PlumX researcher profile to EPrints by an author name search. This will, in turn, keep your PlumX Researcher Profiles automatically up to date with the articles and other relevant research artifacts.
To add a EPrints Author Search URL to a PlumX Researcher Profile:
- Sign in with your PlumX admin credentials and locate the author in the list of PlumX Researchers.
- Click on Show All to see a complete list.
- If the author for whom you are searching doesn’t have a PlumX Profile, click on Add Researcher to create the new profile.
- If you do locate the researcher’s profile, click their picture or their name.
- From within the profile, click on Edit this Profile.
- On the right side of the page, click the EPrints label to expand that section.
- In the box labeled Author Search URL, enter the appropriate URL. You can use the ‘Browse by Author’ URL, or if you want to capture artifacts not only authored, but edited by a researcher, use a shortened version of the Advanced Search URL.
After you save your changes, PlumX will automatically gather the publications for the author(s).