This guide was created to help department and grant administrators generate publication lists spanning several to hundreds of affiliated faculty. While the general strategies are broadly applicable, the specific databases outlined are oriented towards the research outputs of Brown University's Division of Biology and Medicine.
1. Generating a list of publications will first depend on a list of individuals, or grant numbers that you'd like to search. Review your list and consider any possible variants. For example, they might use a nickname or go by their middle name, or their name may include special characters (that are sometimes included and sometimes not).
2. Choose the research databases to search. In general, PubMed is a good starting point. You may need to adjust your search, depending on what you find.
3. Export the references to a citation manager such as Zotero or EndNote. This will allow you to organize and group the publications, and create lists formatted by any citation style.
Keeping a centralized spreadsheet of investigator names will enable you to quickly update and search names without much manual entry. Check out this template which includes formulas to generate searchable columns of names.
In this example (which is taken from the template linked above), you would need to manually enter the last and first name of each person. You can then drag and drop to copy the formulas from the previous row in columns C, D, and E, so that you are left with a column that you can copy and paste directly into a search interface.
The appropriate databases to search will largely depend on the research area of your investigators/grant. PubMed indexes PubMed Central (PMC), which houses publications resulting from NIH funding. However, it is worth considering searching other databases in cases where there may be subject coverage outside of the health/biomedical sciences, and because grant information can be indexed in different ways which may be retrieved differently between different database searches.
Most databases will allow you to create a user account. Doing so will allow you to save and re-run searches, as well as set alerts.
A reference management tool is essential to organizing and formatting citations. While there are many open-source and subscription-based tools out there, the Library supports Zotero and EndNote.
Zotero is a great choice for easily importing references, sharing collections with others, and generating basic reference lists. Cons: Duplicate removal must be done pair by pair. Reference style customizations are possible, but require manipulating code.
EndNote offers additional functionality beyond Zotero, such as creating criteria-based Smart Groups, customizing output styles, bulk-field updates, and customizable duplicate detection features. Cons: Sharing reference groups is possible but cumbersome.
Tutorials for Zotero and EndNote are linked in the Related Guides section.
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