What is my affiliation? Fostering faculty engagement and institutional affiliation in publication authorship

Background: When individual researchers enter their affiliations for publication authorship, there can be a plethora of variations on how their institutional name is represented, including: using acronyms, abbreviations, including the unit’s name with or without a comma, and also, accidental misspellings can occur. This often causes issues when librarians have to search and collect bibliographic information and prepare custom reports based on the school’s or department’s publishing and impact. For instance, librarians struggle to develop specific search strategies to find all faculty bibliographies in databases. As a way to promote the use of uniform affiliation name, the librarians from a midwest medical school’s library created an affiliation lookup tool, using available resources and free online tools, with no coding/programming skills needed.

Description: The affiliation lookup tool was designed to search for uses (correct and incorrect) of affiliation names of the school of medicine units, and assign the “correct” affiliation. We started by creating an Excel spreadsheet using the slicer tool to dynamically display and filter which affiliation names were written in the correct or incorrect form. Using the affiliation slicer as a starting point, the librarians used it to search and quickly check and filter affiliation names to use normalized names while inputting data into the internal journal management and publishing system (OJS systems for the Proceedings of IMPRS). To extend the use of the tool to faculty, students, and staff, we created an online searchable tool using Datawrapper, an online free tool to create responsive, customizable, and live-updating tables. The affiliation lookup search allows researchers to discover, search, sort, and explore affiliation names used in the school of medicine and other clinical partners. In this presentation, we will share the steps we used to create the affiliation slicer and how to transform it into an online affiliation search tool using Datawrapper, a free tool to create visualizations, maps, charts, and tables. In this presentation share the steps for developing the tool.

Conclusion: It’s beneficial for institutions to be able to assert control over how the institutional name should be displayed in authors’ works, not only to track productivity across departments but also to improve the national and international reputation of their research. Librarians play an important role in promoting the uniform use of institutional affiliation in publication authorship. In addition to guiding researchers as part of our outreach activities, this tool is an important component for using the correct and standardized use of affiliation names to reduce future affiliation indexing errors in databases. The final product is shared in the library’s libguide and handouts, and it has led to faculty engagement to promote the correct use of their departments' affiliation names.