Data submission specification

We’re getting a good response from repositories and institutions who would like to provide information about their researchers to improve the data in the Names system (see previous post for details). As a consequence, a data submission specification has been drawn up by Dan Needham. This lists the mandatory and optional fields that Names needs in order to create or match records for institutional staff. It also explains the best way to format your records.

The table below shows the information we’d like to receive from institutions:

Field	Description	Requirement
Primary author family names		Mandatory
Primary author given names		Mandatory
Primary author title	Name prefix / salutation e.g. Mrs, Dr, Sir …	Optional
Primary author date of birth	YYYY-MM-DD	Optional
Primary author date of death	YYYY-MM-DD	Optional
Primary author fields of interest	Semi-colon delimited list of strings describing fields of interest associated with the individual. Preferably values taken from a controlled of terms, although this is not required.	Optional
Primary author home page	URL of web page that contains information that helps identify the individual e.g. personal homepage, institutional page, linkedin page	Optional
Primary author internal identifier	Your internally used identifier.	Optional
Primary author external identifiers	A list of identifiers from other providers assigned to an individual. The list should be semi-colon delimited and contain alternating values for the identifier provider and the identifier itself, i.e. <source>;<identifier>;<source>;<identifier>	Optional
Result publication title	Please generate a complete new row for each publication given for each author.	Mandatory
Journal title		Optional
Volume		Optional
Issue		Optional
Start page		Optional
End page		Optional
Year of publication	YYYY	Optional
Subject area	Classified subject area, may be different from author’s field of activity.	Optional
ISSN		Optional
DOI		Optional
Co-authors	Semi-colon delimited list of co-author names. May include the primary author name if necessary. Preferably in the format <family name(s)> , <given names(s)> however if necessary another format is acceptable as long as there is consistency.	Mandatory

 

There’s also an example record in the required format to illustrate this.