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Publication Tracking: Home

How to search for a publication using author or affiliation.

Publication Tracking Overview

Have you recently been published in a journal? Congratulations! Here are some best practices to track your publications and simplify the process. Depending on your needs, we have tips for conducting searches you can utilize as you track publications in PubMed and SCOPUS.

 

 

Author Search

For a basic author search, you will need:

  • Last Name
  • First Initial

For a more advanced search, you may want to include:

  • Middle Initial 
  • Affiliation
  • Past Affiliations
  • Author ID

Name Ambiguity

Inconsistent naming conventions can complicate an author search.

Institution Search

For an institution search, you will need:

  • Institution name
  • Institution name variants
  • Department name
  • List of researchers in the institution or department

Getting Started

You can search our databases a few ways: by looking for the name of a specific author, by searching a group of authors, or by looking up the institution. 

Things to consider:

  • Which approach to take: broad or limited?
    • This depends on the amount of time you want to spend and what information you have available to conduct your search.
  • What area of research does the publication fall under?
    • This will help you select the best database for your search.
  • Consider current or past affiliations of the authors.
    • Affiliations are a good way to narrow your search.

Name Ambiguity

Naming conventions can vary across different publications. Both authors and institutions use different forms of names (e.g., J Smith, JE Smith) so it is important to account for this in your searching. If you know the author ID, that is a great way to avoid this challenge in tracking publications.

Search Tools and Boolean Operators

Using OR and AND

  • Using OR in your search term pulls in results which could be synonyms of the word you are looking for to broaden your results. This tool is useful when trying to capture alternate names of authors and institutions.
  • Using AND in your search limits the search to only the results that include both terms. If you are searching for an author's work and know they are affiliated with an institution, using AND will guarantee the results will be limited to authors with that name who are also affiliated with that institution.

Parentheses ( )

  • These operate like a math equation in searches. You will be using OR to include multiple author names, for instance. However, to exclude authors not affiliated with an institution, you will use AND between the search terms If you are searching for an author and wish to include alternate names as well as limit the search to authors affiliated with a certain institution, you will use parentheses to separate the two searches.
    • e.g. ("Smith J" OR Smith JR) AND (kansas university OR KU)  
    •  

Quotation Marks " "

  • Quotation marks limit your search to an exact phrase. Searches for "math problem" without quotation marks will include all results with one or both words. When you put the terms in quotation mark, your results will include publications containing the exact phrase.