Publications

Northwestern Elements is a publication database overseen by the Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center. It searches external publication databases including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and others, to identify publications that belong to each faculty member. Its algorithms for matching publications to authors and deduplicating publication records from multiple sources significantly reduce the need for manual curation of publication lists.

The process by which Northwestern Elements associates a publication with you is called "claiming." The system "auto-claims," or automatically claims, publications that contain a unique identifier for you, such as your Scopus ID or ORCiD. Northwestern Elements also uses name-based matching to identify publications that could be yours, but it doesn't auto-claim publications that match on name alone since name is not a unique identifier. Such publications need to be manually claimed to be added to your publication list.

To reduce the need for manual curation of your publication list and improve the ability of Northwestern Elements to correctly match publications to you, please obtain and publish with an ORCID ID. 

The publication list that appears on your public Feinberg Faculty Profile is imported from Northwestern Elements, and is updated daily in the overnight hours.

Only the following publication types are imported for display:

• Journal Articles
• Books
• Chapters

Each publication record must also have one of the following statuses in Northwestern Elements in order to be imported to profiles:

• Published
• Published Online
• Accepted

If you notice that a correction or addition is needed to your publication list for the three types of publications listed above, an update must be made in the source system Northwestern Elements. Each department has staff trained as Northwestern Elements super users to assist. Go to the Staff Support page and look up your primary department to identify staff who can assist you.

The Feinberg Faculty Portal is a central data repository for faculty career activity that supports processes including performance review and promotion and tenure review. As such, the system is designed so that you can generate a CV, and publications are imported from Northwestern Elements to facilitate that.

The Feinberg Faculty Portal receives publication updates from Northwestern Elements weekly, and the following four types of publications are imported:

• Journal Articles
• Books
• Chapters
• Conference Proceedings (this category of publication is less likely to have unique identifiers like Scopus ID or ORCiD that facilitate auto-claiming by Northwestern Elements, so data imports may not be as comprehensive for this publication type)

Each publication record must also have one of the following statuses in Northwestern Elements in order to be imported to the Feinberg Faculty Portal:

• Published
• Published Online
• Accepted

The Feinberg Faculty Portal allows manual entry of another 10 publication types so that you can generate a CV with a comprehensive list of your scholarly works:

• Peer-reviewed educational materials
• Practice Guidelines, Policy, Consensus Statement, and Reports
• Congressional Hearings and Legislative Testimony
• Patents and Intellectual Property
• Data Set
• Software / Code
• Oral Abstracts / Presentations
• Poster Abstracts / Presentations
• Media
• Other Scholarly Works

• To reduce the need for manual curation of your publication list, please obtain and publish with an ORCiD. Northwestern Elements auto-claims publications for you when they obtain this unique identifier.
• Northwestern Elements also auto-claims publications that contain your Scopus ID(s). Scopus may assign more than one author ID to you for different variants of your name. To look up your Scopus ID(s):
  • Log into MyGalter at the Galter Library website (if you are already logged in via Single Sign-On, you won't need to log in again)
  • In the top navigation, select Shortcuts > Scopus and search for your name (or former names) at the Scopus website.
• If you are new to the faculty, an administrator or librarian may need to connect your Scopus ID and ORCiD to your account in order for publication imports to begin (if the "publications" tab is missing from your Feinberg Faculty Profile, this step likely needs to occur). It is helpful if you can provide your ORCiD and Scopus ID(s) to the Staff Support contacts for your department. If you published under different names in your career, please look up your different name variants at the Scopus website, which will enable us to import your publication history.

Feinberg Faculty Profiles and the Feinberg Faculty Portal do not receive data imports with the same frequency.  Profiles are updated daily and the Faculty Portal is updated weekly, so new publications will generally display on your profile first. If you see the publication in your public faculty profile, check the Faculty Portal on Tuesday of the following week, by which time the record should have loaded in the weekly data load. (The vendor generally processes data loads on Mondays, but the time of day varies.)

Faculty are not expected to interact with Northwestern Elements. The system's auto-claiming process reduces the need for manual curation of publication lists, so staff in each department (with the support of librarians at Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center) have been trained as super users of Northwestern Elements to assist faculty when manual updates are needed. 

• If you feel a publication is missing, first check your faculty profile. If the publication appears there, check the Feinberg Faculty Portal on Tuesday of the following week by which time it should have loaded in the weekly data load. 
• If the publication is missing from the faculty profile, or it does not load to the Faculty Portal a week after it first appears on the public profile, contact Staff Support in your primary department for assistance. 

The Feinberg Faculty Portal receives PMCID numbers from Northwestern Elements, if the PMCID is available in the PubMed record for the publication.

Any article published using NIH funds after April 7, 2008, needs to have a PMCID to be in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy. Not all papers with a PMID in PubMed will have a PMCID. Only papers funded by NIH get PMCIDs. The PMCID is posted in PubMed once an article has been successfully processed by PubMed Central (PMC). 

Potential Reasons for a Missing PMCID (when there should be one):

1. The author or journal hasn’t yet submitted the article to the NIH Manuscript Submission (NIHMS) system
2. The article has been submitted, but the NIHMS system has a backlog
3. The PMCID has yet to be posted to PubMed
4. The Northwestern Elements synchronizer hasn’t yet run the refetch for that record in PubMed. (PMCIDs are often added after a publication is first imported to the Feinberg Faculty Portal.)

PMCID Resources

• Pamela Shaw is a Biosciences & Bioinformatics Librarian at Galter Library and the NIH Public Access Compliance Reporter for Northwestern University. She can answer questions regarding PMCIDs for your NIH-funded manuscripts.
• Getting PMCIDs for your Papers
• PMCID-PMID-Manuscript ID-DOI Converter
• Navigating the NIH Public Access Policy for Peer-Reviewed Manuscripts - Why and How to get a PMCID Number