Research articles can change status once they have been published, for example they might be withdrawn, retracted or removed.
Knowing the status of an article is important for anyone who is citing an article. If an article is retracted, withdrawn or removed it may be due to concerns about the scientific method or results which could not be resolved by the authors and publisher.
Another use case for knowing an article’s status is when preprints become published articles. Authors are required by some funders to deposit any data associated with their article in structured, biological databases. The data is often not made public until the research article describing the data set has been published. It is useful to the curators of biological databases to know when an article that was previously posted as a preprint has undergone peer review and been published, so that they can change the status of the data.
The challenge
Europe PMC receives information about withdrawn or removed peer-reviewed journal articles from PubMed, the main source of articles in Europe PMC. If an article has previously been posted as a preprint, before or during journal peer review, Europe PMC links the preprint to the published, peer-reviewed version of the same article. This is done using a matching algorithm. It also links different preprint versions to each other.
We focused initially on the needs of biocurators.
My role as Product Manager
To better understand the needs of biocurators we organised a workshop and I interviewed some of the biocurators individually. Some biocurators wanted to access status updates programmatically, so they could be integrated into existing workflows. Some smaller teams did not have the capability to use APIs, so we also wanted to provide a search interface on the website.
Europe PMC has a public API which is very well used by a wide variety of organisations. I worked closely with the developers to specify a new status updates API endpoint in the main articles API. This included thinking through the request methods needed to meet the user needs that we had identified, and data to be returned in the response.
I worked with the UX Designer to develop designs for the web tool interface and results pages. We tested our designs with biocurators.
I wrote the documentation for the tool, including a description of how status updates are obtained.
I contacted organisations who maintain citation manager software to suggest using our API to provide updates to readers on preprint status.
Outcomes
The Article Status Monitor tool and API were released in early 2022. Whilst article retractions are available from other 3rd party tools, such as Retraction Watch, the preprint status functionality was unique to Europe PMC.
The API and tool was adopted by curators and existing API users, but I was unable to get any traction with citation manager software vendors.
References
PMC, Europe; Harrison, Melissa (2022). Science, trust, and preprints – what changes are needed?. figshare. Poster. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20731078.v1
Europe PMC Team. Europe PMC in 2022: a year in review. 2023, Jan.