Research articles can have have several different statuses. These include for example: published, withdrawn, retracted or removed.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 If an article is retracted, withdrawn or removed it may be due to concerns about the scientific method or results which could not be resolved by the authors and publisher.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 article status is when preprints become published articles. Authors are required by funders to deposit any data associated with the 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Europe PMC receives information about withdrawn or removed peer-reviewed journal articles from PubMed, the main source of articles in Europe PMC.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 to share the findings early 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 wanted to make these status updates easily available programmatically, as well as creating a tool on the website. The concept for the tool was simple:
Enter article identifiers and return status updates
Designing the tool in a way that was easy to use and understand was the biggest challenge of this project.
My role as Product Manager
To better understand the needs of biocurators we organised a workshop and I interviewed some of the biocurators individually.
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 use cases and user needs 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 the 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.