Library Imports Every Year Thousands of Publications to the Current Research Information System UTUCRIS
The Ministry of Education and Culture annually collects publication data from all national universities, research institutes and university hospitals. The data collected are used in the calculation of basic funding for universities and universities of applied sciences and other research and development statistics, monitoring and guidance.
The researcher is responsible for ensuring that all his/hers publications for the University of Turku can be found in the Current Research Information System UTUCRIS. In addition to the publications entered by the researchers themselves, the library imports into the UTUCRIS the data of research conducted at the University of Turku and Turku University Central Hospital from Web of Science, Scopus, Medic and Arto databases. Of the more than 6000 publications published annually at the University of Turku, the library imports about 50% from the above databases into the UTUCRIS. Therefore, it is possible that the publication can already be found in the UTUCRIS when the researchers are reporting their publications into the UTUCRIS.
Publications imported by the library to the UTUCRIS are based on searches in the WoS and Scopus databases, conducted year-round every 28 days. The search results are split into smaller excel files, from which the library's importers import the publication data into the UTUCRIS.
Publications are imported into the UTUCRIS system one by one. Features of the UTUCRIS include importing a publication from WoS, PubMed, or Scopus databases. The feature is useful, but also leaves the importer with a lot of work to do before the publication is ready for validation. Publication data imported from databases often contain only the name of the publication, the abstract, the authors of the publication to a lesser extent, and the journal information. All the data must be carefully checked and many times corrected. Furthermore, importers add the affiliation cards of the researchers of the University of Turku, check rights and license for the parallel publishing, classifications required by the Ministry of Education and Culture, and information related to open access publication. Especially information related to parallel publication and open access rights may require time-consuming work. The library validates, checks and completes also the data of the publications reported by the researchers themselves.
The UTUCRIS offers a tool for importing a publication. However, there are experience-honed WoS and Scopus searches in the background. This saves researchers' working time, since it would take more than half an hour for the researcher to manually enter a single publication, as there are dozens of mandatory data fields depending on the type of publication. Since databases such as WoS and Scopus mainly contain publication data of hard sciences, and there are no corresponding databases for the humanities and social sciences, the library is not able to import all publication data on behalf of researchers. Therefore, it is important for every researcher to check the UTUCRIS that their publications can be found in the system, and if necessary, add missing publications.