Publication entry in EVALuna Biblio

In this video, we present a standard procedure for recording publications using EVALuna Biblio. Detailed written instructions can be found below. If you have any questions, please contact forschungsdekanat-evaluna@ukaachen.de.

For many years, the EVALuna Biblio software has been used to record publications at the medical faculty. To enter data, institutions designate responsible personnel who perform this task either throughout the year or during the data collection round, which takes place in the first quarter of each year. Here, we would like to present a brief guide to the steps involved in EVALuna. The guide is divided into five steps and outlines the standard procedure for recording publications using EVALuna. Depending on the size and publications of your institution and your personal preferences, you may find that a different approach works better for you. In any case, please ensure that you briefly check at the end of the process that your institution’s publication list is complete. A few days after the entry round ends, you will receive a checklist. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact forschungsdekanat-evaluna@ukaachen.de.

Research

We start the publication search in the Web of Science, which you can access from the campus network. The best way to conduct this search may vary from institution to institution—for example, depending on whether you already have a list of publications. If this is not the case, you should generally start with a person search.

When searching, make sure that “Web of Science Core Collection” is selected under “Search in:”—this is usually the default setting. Enter the person’s name (or, for example, their ORCiD) into the search bar. To avoid importing unnecessary publications, limit the results to the year of the data collection round and, if necessary, the following year. To do this, select the relevant years and refine the results by clicking “Refine.” Depending on whether your list appears to contain only correct publications or also those of other individuals with the same name, further filtering—e.g., by affiliation—may be useful. Once the list of publications has been sufficiently refined, select all entries and add them to your Marked List. If necessary, you can now repeat these steps for additional individuals.

Once you have added all the publications you wish to import into EVALuna Biblio to your Marked List, you can export them. To do this, open the Marked List via the folder icon at the top left of the screen and select the “Documents” option. Now export the list using the button and select the “Plain Text File” option. Under “Record Content,” select the option “Full Record”. Please note that, by default, only up to 50 entries are exported. If you have more than 50 entries on your Marked List, select the “Records From” option and set the value from ‘1’ to, for example, “1000.” (If the publications to be imported can be meaningfully divided into groups, it may be advisable to create several smaller sets of publications to prevent performance issues during assignment in EVALuna.) Once all settings are correct, click Export—a text file named “savedrecs.txt” will now be saved to your Downloads folder.

Import

We will now switch to EVALuna Biblio. Access the platform via the link and log in with your email address. If you have forgotten your password, you can request a new one via email using the “Forgot your password?” feature. If you are new to this role and do not yet have an account, please contact us at forschungsdekanat-evaluna@ukaachen.de.

In the system, select the “Import / Web of Science” section in the navigation bar. Select your file from Web of Science and transfer everything to the system by clicking “Import.” The import may take some time. Once it is complete, you will receive a list of the imported publications—you can also view these later under “Import / Import Report.” Now click on “Mass Assignment” in the import report or select the “Assignment” section in the navigation bar at the top to proceed to the next step.

Assignment

On this page, you will find a list of all affiliations for the publications you have imported. If an affiliation belongs to your institution, assign it using the “Drag & Drop” buttons on the right-hand side and then check the box to complete the process. If it does not belong to your institution, you can uncheck it directly without assigning it. Above the list, you will find a series of filters and the number of affiliations still to be processed. This number is usually significantly higher than the number of imported publications, as most publications have multiple affiliations.

The list of affiliations to be processed can usually be significantly reduced in advance: To do this, enter the word “Aachen” in the exclusion filter on the far right. The sublist will then contain only entries that do not include the word “Aachen” and almost certainly do not belong to your institution. You can now complete the processing of these entries in a single step using the “Check all” button—this may take a few moments. If necessary, some entries containing only names may remain at the bottom—we will return to these later. Now clear the exclusion filter to process the remaining entries.

You can now edit the remaining list directly or using additional filters. If an affiliation belongs to your institution, select the button for your institution or the respective sub-institution on the right and drag it over. For technical reasons, sub-institutions must be assigned directly to the respective authors. Please make the assignment as precise as possible. When assigning a sub-institution, the main institution is automatically added. Please do not remove this. You can uncheck affiliations of other institutions directly.

Once you have edited all affiliations, there may still be some special entries remaining that contain a longer list of names—these usually belong to larger collaborations or study groups. Here, if applicable, assign the individuals belonging to your institution directly and then uncheck the entry. If the assignment list is empty, you are finished editing.

Verification

Once all publications have been imported and assigned, you can check whether everything is working and whether the system has correctly recognized all publications.

To do this, first click on “Search for missing publications” in the navigation bar under the Publications tab. Here you will see a (possibly empty) list of all publications that you have imported into the system but whose affiliations have NOT been assigned. You can access the detailed view of these publications by clicking on the corresponding number and check whether the publication was simply not assigned by mistake. In this case, you can make the assignment directly in the detailed view. If the publication was correctly not assigned to your institution and was only imported by mistake, you can remove the publication from the checklist using the “X” icon on the right-hand side. Occasionally, there may also be a data quality issue, for example, preventing the publication from being assigned. In this case, please notify us at forschungsdekanat-evaluna@ukaachen.de, providing the six-digit EVALuna ID.

Under the “Publications / Total” tab, you will find a publication tree and can use various views to check whether all your publications are present in the system. If you are missing a publication, it may be that it has already been listed for the following year—this can happen in particular if it is still listed as an “Early Access” publication or has only been published online so far.

If you wish to check only the publications of a specific unit, you can do so under “Publications / Filter.” To do this, select the relevant year range and the unit, then click “Search.”

Additional Publications

Some articles cannot be found via Web of Science or are listed there only after a delay. In this case, or if you wish to add a few late-reported articles, for example, it is advisable to check whether they are listed in PubMed. In this case, you can use the PubMed import under “Import / PubMed.” You can search directly by the publication’s title here—but you’ll usually find the publication more easily if you use the PubMed ID (PMID) directly in your search. You can easily look up the PubMed ID via https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ if the publication is listed in PubMed. It can also be used if you’re unable to import the publication via its title.

Using the PubMed import, you can import publications only one at a time. The assignment process then proceeds exactly as it does when importing from Web of Science. You can also complete the assignment in the detail view. In this case, open the assignment list afterward and click “Check All” to complete the process and avoid outdated entries.

Some publications cannot be found in either Web of Science or PubMed. This often applies, for example, to articles in German-language journals and, in particular, book publications. These publications do not need to be entered into EVALuna, but should instead be entered into RWTH Publications. Publications that have been recorded in EVALuna are automatically transferred to RWTH Publications and do not need to be entered there again.

In rare cases, a publication may be expected to be listed in Web of Science because it has already been published in print in a journal with an impact factor, yet cannot be found there. In such or similar cases, or if you have further questions, please feel free to contact the Dean of Research at the Faculty of Medicine at any time via forschungsdekanat-evaluna@ukaachen.de.