IDS Troubleshooting
About IDS
How IDS Works
Interfolio Data Service (IDS) periodically pulls in data about scholarly activities from several large data sources. When pulling in data, IDS searches by a faculty member's first name, last name, and the current university they are affiliated with to gather information. IDS will also highlight any aspects that would cause IDS not to pull data, such as name changes or maiden names.
IDS will only provide data that is associated to a faculty member at their current institution. IDS will not provide scholarship data associated to a faculty member that was published while at a different institution.
On the Homepage, matched activities are displayed which can easily be validated and added to a FAR account. The IDS process does the following:
- Takes your roster details
- Identifies the faculty member from the name, email, and institution in Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR, Faculty180)
- Searches for books, book chapters, journal articles, and proceedings found using the following sources:
- Crossref
- Open Alex
- PubMed
- Returns the data and deduplicates against data already in FAR
- Presents data to faculty/administrator to accept or reject
Examples of IDS Issues
| Situation | Example |
|---|---|
| If the author is publishing under another name, those results will not appear in IDS. |
|
| IDS only provides search results for an author's current institution. If the author is publishing under an institution different from their current institution, those results will not appear in IDS. |
|
| If the item type is unknown or NOT one of the four types we support (Books, Book Chapters, Journal articles, and Proceedings) these will not appear in IDS. | Incorrect Item Types: Grants, undefined publications, manuscripts awaiting publication, advanced online publications, encyclopedia entries, and any other items that are NOT books, book chapters, journal articles, or proceedings. |
| Crossref and Open Alex specialize in searches for books, book chapters, journal articles, and proceedings within the sciences. | Arts and Humanities, Law, and Theology, may have lower IDS return rates. |
| IDS will skip duplicate entries in FAR as part of Interfolio's deduplication tool. | |
| If a record is published after IDS runs, those results will not appear. |
IDS Troubleshooting
1. Gather evidence
To help us investigate this we would ask for the following details:
- Examples of Faculty member names/details
- Expected number of items that they think they should see
2. Spot-check and confirm that this is indeed an issue
- Document the details in a form similar to the one below. Add in the name and the expected number.
| Faculty | PID | Link | Reported # | IDS | Scopus | Pubmed | CR | Researchgate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Faculty Name | 123456789 | www.org.com/faculty-member | 34 | 23 | 23 | 23 | 4 | 23 |
- Get the link to their web profile by searching Google or going to their org’s website.
- Search for the name, family name, and institution through Scopus, Pubmed, Crossref, or Researchgate, recording the number of publications found (adding a link to the search made, if possible)
If the searched item IS in two of the systems listed above but IS NOT in IDS and it looks like it could be an issue on our side (or you have some questions you want to ask the team) then proceed to step 3.
3. Share findings
If you notice that IDS is not returning the correct number of results, submit a ticket to our support desk at help@interfolio.com with where you found the missing information (this may include a profile URL).