NWB2023_Collecting author affiliation data for Flemish non-Web of Science SSH publications process, results and lessons learned

In 2019, a parameter measuring international collaboration was added to the Flemish performance-based research funding system. Its implementation required author affiliation data for co-authored publications from the Flemish Academic Bibliography for the Social Sciences and Humanities (VABB-SHW). However, affiliations were not available in the database, leading to the launch of an extensive data collection operation. Because half of VABB-SHW publications are not included in the Web of Science, a multifaceted data retrieval approach was required as no single affiliation data source was available for this subset of more than 23.000 publications.

Apart from the consultation of other databases like Scopus or Crossref, almost 85% of the data had to be retrieved manually, applying a step-by-step methodology. Multiple issues were encountered; not only about the findability and accessibility of publication metadata, but also on the level of the availability of identifiers for coding all affiliated organizations. However, the process delivered a template as well as the infrastructure to collect and code affiliation data in a multidimensional way. It will ultimately not only lead to the activation of the internationalization parameter and the addition of affiliation metadata, but also to a more detailed insight in international academic collaboration making use of publications outside a major citation database.

During the presentation, we will describe the process, results and lessons learned, as well as briefly zoom in on an extended organization database that was generated by the project.