Europe PMC provides access to millions of life sciences research articles. It can be challenging to find articles by a particular author or co-author, particularly if they have a common name. To resolve this issue, Europe PMC integrates with ORCID, the registry of unique, persistent identifiers for academic researchers. Authors can maintain their own ORCID record by ‘claiming’ articles they have authored through integrated services such as Europe PMC.
To promote the value of ORCID iDs for researchers and increase uptake of the ORCID features in Europe PMC, my manager proposed creating author profile pages for authors.
The challenge
For this project the biggest challenges were:
- how to make author profiles discoverable from the search results in Europe PMC
- what information to include in the profiles
- how to communicate to authors how the profiles had been created and how to manage which publications were listed on their profiles
My role as User Researcher and Designer
Based on my understanding of what information was available using the Europe PMC search by ORCID id, I created some prototype designs for the profiles. These started as paper prototypes and developed into higher fidelity visual designs as below.
I carried out remote and in person moderated usability testing with life sciences researchers using paper and digital prototypes. The testing provided several useful insights, for example:
- Confusion with the terminology used to describe open access and free full text articles in Europe PMC.
- How participants expected to be able to interact with the charts and filter or download information.
- Participants assumed it would be a public profile page and felt it would be more useful if they could look at other researcher profiles, similar to Google Scholar.
- Expectations about what types of publication should be included, and how citations data should be presented.
As discoverability of the profiles was important I sketched out a flow for how profiles could be accessed and linked from different places.
I then developed this concept into higher fidelity mock-ups with annotations for the developers.
Outcomes
Author profiles were released in 2016. An example author profile.
The profiles of highly cited authors are linked from the search results page.
Learnings
The biggest learning from this project was that researchers were not always comfortable with an author profile being created automatically for them. They wanted to edit the profile and curate their list of publications or hide the profiel completely. We assumed at the start that authors would want control over their profile and provided instructions on how to do this via the ORCID website. However, it was not particularly easy to explain the concept of how ORCID iDs were integrated with Europe PMC and authors expected to be able to do this from Europe PMC.