Some bibliometricians recently studied how to come up with a comprehensive list of publications for an author. You can't do it from any one source alone - machine-suggested author curated lists are maybe best, but database lists, author lists, etc. are all horribly incomplete. This is even when the funding and or accreditation for the author/institution depends on metrics derived from publications! So multiply this by all the authors in the organization and then their co-authors who can't spell your institution right (or have the right city or zip code in our case)...
Christina -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of McDonald, Stephen Sent: Friday, October 13, 2017 3:13 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Persistent Identifiers for organizations/institutions. Kyle Banerjee asks: > I feel there is another issue at play, namely that librarians are > sometimes too quick to let others dump their grunt work on them. For > example, if it's important for a department to track its own output > when they know better than anyone else who is involved and what they > want to track, why do they expect to hand this problem to librarians > who will just parse through a bunch Of inconsistent and incomplete > data they find and cobble together on their own? It's complicated, way more > labor intensive and less accurate than anything the department would do, and > doomed to failure out the door. One sad problem I have seen is that the departments (or the members of the departments) _don't_ really want to track their own output, because they are afraid that it will end up being used to evaluate their performance. The larger organization wants to track output for promotional purposes and encouraging collaboration between departments and organizations, but the departments oppose efforts to require it. That leaves organizations floundering for other solutions. Steve McDonald [email protected]
