The SCSU Authors Citation Database is a collection of publications authored by SCSU faculty, staff, administration, and students. (It does not include student theses and dissertations unless those are published separately.)
The bulk of the citations come from databases that track author affiliation, notably Scopus. However, since there is no source or collection of sources that covers all journals, books, conferences and other publications, we also solicit direct submissions from authors. Please check the database first, but we strongly encourage authors to submit their publications to us as soon as possible.
Read below for history and updates to the project.
About the SCSU Authors Project
Sept. 2023 Update: The SCSU Authors/Research Celebration will take place this fall, Nov. 8, 4-6pm. Coverage dates will be 2019-2023 - please check the database and get your publications to us!
Over the summer, we added about 1000 older books and reports to the database, which is now up to around 5400 works back to 1939.
The database can also include creative works (not just peer-reviewed/scholarly publications), including literary works, performances, and exhibits. Contact Rebecca Hedreen for more info about this expansion and to have your creative works included.
March 2023 update: If you have 2019-2022 publications that you would like included in the Provost's Research Celebration (postponed until Fall 2023), please get them in ASAP! Check the database first to see if we have them already. If not, please submit using the form linked on the left.
And please admire our new interface! The CSC400 students who developed the interface as their capstone project did a wonderful job.
Rebecca is still interested in talking to people about performance-based "citations" - contact her if you are interested in promoting your exhibitions, performances, and other non-text based creative activity.
April 2022 Update:
We now have over 4000 citations going back to 1938. But we can't find everything via the major databases - our authors publish in many specialty publications! Send us your publication announcements using the Additions link on the left.
Special performance note! If your creative activity involves exhibits, performances, or other non-publication works, we'd like to talk about how to include those as well. Please contact Rebecca Hedreen, hedreenr1@southernct.edu.
January 2021:
In the fall of 2019, Librarian Rebecca Hedreen responded to a call from the Provost's office for articles and book chapters written by Southern authors. Knowing that these lists get unwieldy very quickly, she volunteered to manage the collection and help format the citations. She had recently been doing some professional development regarding citation databases and citation analysis, and she realized that we didn't need to depend on calls for articles: much of this information was already publically available, just hidden from easy access.
Using Web of Science, Microsoft Academic, The Lens, and later Scopus, she harvested several thousand citations and rapidly discovered that the data was messy, confusing, and sometimes contradictory. Luckily, our new STEM Librarian Diana Hellyar volunteered to help with the data cleanup and the SCSU Authors project got underway.
As anyone who has worked on a data project knows, data mean nothing without access. We could make the Zotero Library we created accessible to the public, but the search interface leaves a lot to be desired. Rebecca asked the Computer Science department about working with a student and was put in touch with Dr. Alaa Sheta who was organizing the Computer Science Capstone course (CSC400) for Spring 2020. Thanks to his support, we suddenly had a pair of students ready and willing to create a functional, informative, and esthetic interface for our new database.
And then COVID-19 hit. Despite a lot of set backs, our student team very nearly got a working website online. While we were disappointed that we didn't get our website, we were very encouraged that the plan was completely feasible, we just needed a little more time.
Meanwhile, we've been working through the citations, cleaning them up, verifying them, and working out procedures to streamline the process so that upkeep of the database would be simple. Citation clean up consisted of checking for improper capitalization. Some citations, particularly older ones, imported with everything capitalized which had to be fixed in each individual article. In addition to clean up, articles were examined to determine which department the SCSU author belonged. Each article was tagged with a department code and sorted into the appropriate department folder.
The current database has over 3000 entries from 1959 to the present, divided up by departments and offices, and is searchable by author, title, year, and keyword. The focus is on publications published during the authors' time at Southern, but does not include student theses and dissertations (unless those were published independently.) View it at https://libguides.southernct.edu/scsuauthors
For the future, we will be continuing to update the database with new publications. Additions and corrections can be made at https://southernct.libwizard.com/f/authors or by contacting Rebecca Hedreen or Diana Hellyar. Imports from public databases will be added on a regular basis. Any sort of publication can be added, and we are open to including other sorts of scholarly and creative work by members of our community. (Student theses and dissertations are not included, unless they have been published independently, as they are searchable in SouthernSearch and Proquest Dissertations.) If you are interested in data extracts for analysis or import into other systems (such as ORCID or Digital Measures) please contact Rebecca Hedreen.
-- Rebecca Hedreen and Diana Hellyar January, 2021