Increasing Visibility of Research in IUPUI ScholarWorks through NCBI LinkOut

Abstract

Background : To increase the visibility and access to an academic university’s institutional repository content by participating in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) “Institutional Repository LinkOut” program.

Description : The authors used R, an open source programming language, and an R package called ‘rentrez’ to a) identify those articles in the university's repository that were in PubMed and b) determine of those, which ones did not already have full-text available via PubMed Central. Identifying articles in PubMed that are not in PubMed Central is required by NCBI in order to participate in the “Institutional Repository LinkOut” program. Using the R package, a set of 4,400 open access items from the repository were processed, 557 eligible records were identified, and were sent to NCBI. In June 2018, the R scripts were revised to further streamline the process--at the beginning of July 2018 a total of 2,129 repository items were processed and 434 eligible records were identified for inclusion in the LinkOut program.

Conclusion : The university’s institutional repository experienced a significant increase in visibility due to its participation in the NCBI’s “Institutional Repository LinkOut” program. In its first implementation (July 2017), this automated solution was estimated to save over 30 hours of manual work on the part of the library staff. The LinkOut program has resulted in a 9% annual increase in web traffic to the repository and PubMed is now the third most frequent referral site to the repository. The R script and implementation process are publicly available, via GitHub, to help other institutions reduce the barriers for participating in the LinkOut program.