Development and Validation of an Automated Tool to Retrieve and Curate Faculty Publications of Academic Departments

Abstract

Introduction Academic departments need to monitor their faculty's academic productivity for various purposes, such as reporting to the medical school dean, assessing the allocation of non-clinical research time, evaluating for rank promotion, and reporting to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Our objective was to develop and validate a simple method that automatically generates query strings to identify and process distinct department faculty publications listed in PubMed and Scopus. Methods We created a macro-enabled Excel workbook (Microsoft, Redmond, WA) to automate the retrieval of faculty publications from the PubMed and Scopus bibliometric databases (available at https://bit.ly/get-pubs). Where the returned reference includes the digital object identifier (doi), a link is provided in the workbook. Duplicate publications are removed automatically, and false attributions are managed. Results At the University of Miami, between 2020 and 2021, there were 143 anesthesiology faculty-authored publications with a PubMed identifier (PMID), 95.8% identified by the query and 4.2% missed. At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, between 2019 and 2021, there were 760 anesthesiology faculty-authored publications with a PMID, 94.3% identified by the query and 5.7% missed. Recall, precision, and the F1 score were all above 93% at both medical centers. Conclusions We developed a highly accurate, simple, transportable, scalable method to identify publications in PubMed and Scopus authored by anesthesiology faculty. Manual checking and faculty feedback are required because not all names can be disambiguated, and some references are missed. This process can greatly reduce the burden of curating a list of faculty publications. The methodology applies to other academic departments that track faculty publications.

Keywords: authorship; bibliometrics; library science; pubmed; scopus.

Figure 1. Setup fields for the publication retrieval workbook

The columns and rows correspond to the Excel setup worksheet. The fields with orange highlighting contain the input used to create the search query, including the date range, the location of the folders where the output of the search results are to be placed, the keywords used to identify the institution and department, and whether letters or erratum are to be excluded from the search. Each faculty member's last and first name is entered in columns C and D, respectively, and a unique index is applied to each. The initial of the first name is calculated automatically. If a faculty has more than one representation of their name, the same index is used for each entry. Journal abbreviations and full names for specialty journals in which departmental faculty publish but where the department name is occasionally omitted or as a matter of journal policy are also entered. A G-mail account and password must be provided to use the automated email macro in the workbook. The underlining of the hyperlinked email addresses is generated automatically by Excel.