The RePEc Blog

This post is part of a series on the new facility at Socionet that allows authors to enrich their profiles.

From the previous post you know how to log into the Socionet system to enhance the data about your papers.

This post provides detailed instructions on how to make a specific type of enrichment. For any of your papers with co-authors, you can add information about your role(s) in making this collective research output. The final result of such enrichment can look like this.

Between the paper’s title and authorship data, the Socionet system inserts three types of supplementary information: 1) person names of those with a profile, including a link to the profile itself; 2) the number of publications that this person also claimed, with a link to the list of these publications; 3) list of roles in preparing this paper that are claimed by the person, including pop-up comments to the role (if any), and links to the detailed view of the added data.

If you would like to do the same for your publications available at RePEc and Socionet you have to find your paper in the Socionet system. You log into the system (if not yet in), and you will see at the right: “You are one of … authors. Claim your role?”

Clicking on this text you open this form to specify your data

In the form field “Comments” you can provide some additional text explanation for the reader. This text will be pop-up on the users’ screen when they point their mouse on this link.

The drop-down list “Relationship type” contains taxonomy values applicable for the current use case. See below how taxonomy classifies author roles.

For RePEc Author Service users the drop-down list “Save in collection” contains a name of a single personal storage provided by the Socionet system for the user making linkages. Users who logged in the system by their login to the Socionet Personal Zone (not the same as RePEc Author Service short-ID) can create many collections with different names for storing their linkages. In that case the names of these collections will be available for selection in the “Save in collection” drop-down list.

The buttons “Save“, “Cancel” and the link “Help” work here as usual.

This form is used at the Socionet system in different places and these cases only differ by the list of values in the “Relationship type” drop-down list. For specifying author roles we provide the taxonomy published by the CRediT project that we slightly modified.

Using this taxonomy we made the controlled semantic vocabulary called the “Taxonomy of researchers contributions to collaborative research output“. The vocabulary is available in English and Russian languages. It is English version consists of the following author roles:

Manuscript preparation: writing the initial draft
Manuscript preparation: visualization/data presentation
Manuscript preparation: critical review, commentary or revision
Performing the experiments
Methodology development
Study conception
Investigation: data/evidence collection
Computation
Resources provision
Formal analysis
Data curation
Project administration
Supervision
Funding acquisition

This semantic vocabulary exists at Socionet as a collection of roles as listed above. This list can be easily updated and developed according users’ requests and testing results. Our approach also allows for users to create their own semantic vocabularies (i.e.. taxonomies) and to propose them to the community for using it together or instead of an already existing taxonomy.

The CRediT project has launched a survey  to collect opinions about this taxonomy. We are going to use their updates for improving the semantic vocabulary at Socionet.

From a technical point of view when a user specifies the author role she/he creates a linkage where the source object of the linkage is the user’s personal profile, the target object is the paper whose metadata is being enriched and the semantic of the linkage is a taxonomy value classifying the author role.

This approach allows tracing, aggregating and processing data about author roles in some statistical diagram, e.g. like this one from the linkage statistics page built by the Socionet system for every personal profile –

On the left side of the diagram there is the distribution of roles of some particular author. On the right side there is the distribution of roles specified by all co-authors of this author.