Authors and affiliations

bjohas · March 6, 2019

We're working on a project that is trying to map research across authors and institutions across Africa. It would be helpful to us to be able to record some information about the author, such as the affiliation (which some metadata dbs offer).

What's the suggested/ a good way of doing this?

(Disambiguation of authors would also be helpful, but could be done with a name suffix... see https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/36088/orcid)

HLHJ · March 6, 2019

Wikidata. It's a Wikipedia sister project, funded by the same foundation, and likewise free and editable by anyone.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

I'd suggest contacting relevant WikiProjects for help, namely
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Africa
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Source_MetaData

bjohas · March 6, 2019

@HLHJ thanks! Asking for help in what way? To help catalogue institutions or researchers?

HLHJ · March 6, 2019

If you have published sources for the information you want to add (even just a uni website), they'll show you how to add it and possibly help you add it. Be aware that any information added to Wikidata is CC-0, essentially public domain, not copyleft.

Forgive me if you know this already, but you can post to the "discussion" tabs of those pages, including the string {{Ping project|Africa}} as described on the linked pages.