Assigning multiple affiliations to a single author: How to bypass the OJS and OJS PubMed XML plugin limitations?

Greetings,

To my understanding OJS does not have a mechanism to association multiple affiliations to a single contributor out of the box.

Considering the following example for an author with two affiliations:

John Smith 1,2

  1. Office of research, University of ABC
  2. XYZ Medical research centre

A user cannot enter affiliations into individual fields per item and therefore must use an arbitrary separator (e.g., a separator character or a number) to isolate each affiliation. In my example below I used a number inside a bracket: [n]

Therefore, the information in my example should be entered into OJS in the following format:

Author Name Fields: John Smith

Affiliation Field: [1] Office of research, University of ABC [2] XYZ Medical research centre

This is a poor practice enforced because of the way OJS works. One of the areas that it negatively affects is the PubMed XML export plugin.

The same information converted by PubMed XML plugin will be generated in this syntax:

<Author>

<FirstName> John</FirstName>

<LastName> Smith </LastName>

<Affiliation> [1] Office of research, University of ABC [2] XYZ Medical research centre </Affiliation>

</Author>

Which will be displayed as:

John Smith 1

[1] Office of research, University of ABC [2] XYZ Medical research centre

Which is not ideal and looks odd when there is more than one author with multiple affiliations. (Additionally, plugin drops <AffiliationInfo> tag that supposed to wrap the <Affiliation> tag, which is a separate issue).

Now, I was wondering if anyone has a suggestion how to avoid this (In OJS or in the Plugin). Otherwise, the PubMed XML plugin will not be particularly useful because of the considerable manual editing needed to address this post export.

Thank you,
Kasra

The PubMed XML plugin is in many aspects incomplete. I had to revise it to be consistent with the requirements by NIH. Please drop me a PM if you are interested.

In OJS, we separate multiple affiliations by a semicolon. In the plugin, we use this marker to split the affiliations.

Still, after export, some of the records have to be edited manually. This has rather to do with that some information is available only in the PDF and not in the metadata.

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Not sure it if helps, as it is a simplicistic way-aroudn, but when an author has two affiliaitions, we combine them in a single one using “and”. Not as sophisticated as we would like it, but it create no problems when submitting to pmc.
L.

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Hi all,

See also this related issue:

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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Hi Martin,

Thank you for your advice. I am going to test separating affiliations with semicolon and see how it behaves and evaluate the pros and cons.

I have some comments and questions about the plugin, that I will PM you about because they may not be directly related to this thread.

Kind regards,
K

Hi Lucia,

Thank you so much for your advice. We are going through a migration of a large block of content into OJS and I want to make sure we are doing the right thing.

Kind regards,
K