Institutions in Knowledge Base

The Institution record can be used to describe institutions, which are playing in Knowledge Base various roles. The institution record can be used inter alia as:

Roles of institutions in the knowledge base

Institutions can play different roles in the knowledge base system:

  1. May be combined for publication as a corporate author

  2. In the publication, they can appear as the publisher

  3. May appear as an affiliation of an external author

  4. In projects, they can be partners, consortium members, contractors, principals, etc.

  5. In activities and achievements - they can be scientific societies that award important prizes

 

Re. 1 As in the case of individual authors, it is possible to maintain a database of institutional authors. This database should be used when filling in the 'Institutional author' field on the same basis as the individual author database is used when filling in the 'Author' field.

Ad. 2 Institution A publisher can be included as a publisher in a publication of the Monograph type. If, in addition, it is a publisher on the list of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, this results in the assignment of monograph points.

Ref. 3 This function is extremely important if we want to illustrate cooperation between our university (and its units) and external institutions (universities).

Re 4 Institutions are included in objects of type project as

  • a partner in consortium

  • funding institution

  • research purcheser

This allows to analyze international cooperation, to create statistics on the effectiveness of such cooperation.

Re. 5 Scientific societies often play a variety of roles in scientific activities - for example, they are publishers, owners of databases, award grants (often prestigious ones).

The institutions stored in the knowledge base can be of different, not mutually exclusive categories. For example, an institution can be a scientific unit, and at the same time it can perform publishing functions.

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By selecting a category, the nature of the institution is determined, which gives the possibility of linking to objects of other types. For example, if an entity has the nature of a research funding institution, it can be included in the project record as the entity that announces the competition, or funds the project.

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Categories of the institutions

Usually the institutions records are originated in the Knowledge Database as follows:

  1. loaded automatically to the knowledge database with publications imported from global databases, such as Scopus, WoS, CrossRef, PubMed, etc. In this case the institutions are taken from the bibliographic descriptions as publishers or affiliations of the authors, editors, etc. (in case of Scopus they are already imported with the Scopus ID)

  2. entered manually to the knowledge database, when

    1. the bibliographic description is made manually

    2. the project application records and project records are entered manually

  3. the can also be imported from dedicated databases, authority list, etc.

Because of (1), it is very important, that the institution records contain external identifiers, so that they can be properly identified by the system while loaded to the database. If loaded from Scopus, the records usually have the Scopus ID. Otherwise it is worth adding the RoR identifier (see https://ror.org/ ). Since the version 3.3.7 it is possible to link the institutions to the RoR registry. As a result we get:

  1. unique ROR identifier

  2. address and URL of the institution

  3. category of the institution (mapped to the system categories)

The institutions may be stored as local embeddings in the records where they are used locally, but not visible for other records, or in Master list, where their descriptions may be shared with many various records. It is recommended to register descriptions of institutions to the Master. The decision if the instition should be stored in Master cane be taken when importing data or during the manual entering bibliographic record (while saving). In the event that you do not find an institution in the master, though you can retrieve bibliographic records with the search by the institution name, it is advisable to transfer the institution to the Master file. This mah cause cfeating a duplicate, so one should remeber to merge duplicate records.

An example description of an institutional author is shown in the figure below.

The description of the institution includes the following fields:

  • Full name - full name of the institution in Polish and English.

  • Acronym - abbreviation of the name of the institution

  • Other forms - other forms of the institution's name

  • Category - we denote the category of the institution, e.g. scientific, educational institution

 

Institutions can form a hierarchy, e.g., Oxford Press, a publishing house, can be merged with Oxford University. Similarly, departments of external units may be merged with their universities.

 

The description of the institution includes the following fields:

  • Full name - full name of the institution in Polish and English.

  • Acronym - abbreviation of the name of the institution

  • Other forms - other forms of the institution's name

  • Category - we denote the category of the institution, e.g. scientific, educational institution

 

Due to the fact that the records of the institution are used in many places, it is necessary to supplement them with important elements of description, including:

  • flagged in the figure to meet the criteria for including institutions in the parameterization of labor force participation

  • address and contact information (Profile tab) to visualize international cooperation.

Independently, the system pulls data (e.g., identifiers) from external databases (Scopus) to automate the geographic localization process.

Institutions can form a hierarchy, e.g., Oxford Press, a publishing house, can be merged with Oxford University. Similarly, departments of external units may be merged with their universities.

 

If available it is recommended to load an insttution master already with some identifiers, especially in the case when Scopus database is planned for importing bibliographic data, the Scopus IDs are very useful.