khuffman
commented
8 years ago In RI, we "kind of" enter the author info twice, once in the upper fields, and then we have a field low down on that page called Citation (not required) that users are supposed to fill in with the exact citation of the article (authors +journal name, volume, pages etc.), of course not every one remembers to fill in that citation field after their paper is published.
I favor your second suggestion: that "if status=published, then display the ordered author field collection field, with all text fields instead of entity reference fields, to capture the author order and the names as they appear in the publication.". It would make it work better with all of our existing publications.
I’ve been looking into an alternate method for entering in authors so that the author order is captured correctly. I have a version working on our dev site, but I thought of a few potential issues and wondered if you all have any ideas.
The version I’ve been working on is the one from the demo: it stores the author information in a field collection to group author number and name. A radio button for EPSCoR vs. nonEPSCoR author is presented, and if EPSCoR is clicked, an entity reference appears for the author name, and if nonEPSCoR is clicked, a text field appears for the author name (using the name module, so it has separate fields for first name or initial, middle name(s) or initial(s), and last name).
One potential issue with the current author input method and the alternate version I’ve been working on is that the EPSCoR author entity reference field always displays the author name as [first name] [last name], but I noticed that many publish under slightly modified names - usually including a middle initial, or maybe [first initial] [middle name] [last name]. Should this be changed to somehow capture the names exactly as they appear in the publication?
If so, it seems like we need to ask for the EPSCoR author name twice: once as an entity reference (to attach the publication to the authors in the system) and again as a text field that captures the name exactly as it appears in the publication. I think users might be annoyed to enter the same information twice, though, but I can’t think of any way around that.
One thing I was thinking of is to keep the existing EPSCoR authors entity reference field for tagging authors, and leave it at that until the publication is published. Then, if status=published, display the ordered author field collection field, with all text fields instead of entity reference fields, to capture the author order and the names as they appear in the publication. That would make it easier to update existing publication nodes in the system: I can find the author order in Google Scholar if the publication has been published; otherwise I don’t know what the order is supposed to be without contacting one of the authors.