Meeting with the Principal Investigator of the Faculty Publications Database

Today I met with Nancy Steffen-Fluhr the principal investigator of the project to compile the faculty publications database. One of the goals of her project is to investigate the collaborative relationships among the contributing authors. She is very concerned that the database be as exhaustive as possible. She discovered that there were many publications of the CVs of NJIT faculty that were not found in the commercial databases. We determined that publications at small conferences and in new e-journals were not included in Scopus or the Ebscohost databases. We spent much of our time in my office and at lunch discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the commercial bibliographic databases that we have. For example Scopus was very good at picking up the author affiliations, but there was inconsistency in the data entry. Are we the New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJIT, New Jersey Inst of Technol or what? She figured that there are 16 ways the institution name could be in a database. The coverage of Scopus is excellent after 1995, but there still is a lack of confidence in older data. We are especially concerned about the affiliation data in the ACM Digital Library since that database has publications not found anywhere else. For this project Nancy was not concerned about the School of Architecture or the humanities.