About

How this publication list works

Overview

This website automatically aggregates and displays publications from members of the College of MVLS Learning Teaching and Scholarship network. Rather than manually maintaining a list that quickly becomes outdated, we leverage the ORCID infrastructure to keep our publication list current.

How It Works

flowchart LR
    A[ORCID Profiles] -->|Weekly fetch| B[R Script]
    B --> C[SoTL Classification]
    C --> D[JSON Data File]
    D --> E[Quarto Website]
    E -->|GitHub Actions| F[GitHub Pages]

  1. Data Source: Each network member maintains their own ORCID profile with their publications
  2. Automated Fetching: A weekly GitHub Actions workflow runs an R script that queries the ORCID public API
  3. Deduplication: Publications that appear on multiple authors’ profiles (collaborations) are deduplicated by DOI
  4. SoTL Classification: Publications are automatically tagged as education-related based on journal names and title keywords
  5. Website Generation: Quarto renders the data into a searchable, browsable website
  6. Deployment: The site is automatically deployed to GitHub Pages

SoTL Classification

Publications are automatically classified as Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) or education-related using two methods:

Journal Matching

Publications appearing in known education journals are automatically tagged. The list includes journals across higher education, medical education, science education, and discipline-specific pedagogy journals.

Keyword Matching

For publications not matched by journal, titles are scanned for education-related terms such as “teaching”, “learning”, “pedagogy”, “curriculum”, “assessment”, “student”, and many others.

This classification is imperfect but provides a useful filter without requiring manual curation. The keyword and journal lists can be expanded by editing R/fetch_orcid_publications.R.

Limitations

  • Only ORCID-indexed publications: Works not added to ORCID profiles won’t appear
  • Metadata quality varies: Publication details depend on how they were entered in ORCID
  • Weekly updates: There’s up to a 7-day delay between ORCID updates and website updates
  • No full-text: We only display metadata, not full papers

Source Code

The complete source code for this website is available on GitHub. Feel free to fork and adapt for your own network.