Hi = Thank you for your work

We're very much interested in using serial solutions to replace our existing e-resources lists. Currently these are organized in two flavors

1) Alphabetically e.g. http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/e-resource-books/d
2) Using MeSH markup e.g. http://www.hsl.virginia.edu/e-resource-books-taxonomy/Epidemiology

Would it require a lot of heavy lifting to modify this API to output the journal title lists as opposed to the article level results?

Also = we serve up impact factors in our list based on ISSN / EISSN numbers - do you see this as being somewhat doable given this module and perhaps a .tpl file or something akin?

Comments

bertrama’s picture

bertrama commented
Assigned: Unassigned » bertrama

Hi Anson,

I'm sorry to take so long to get back to you on these two questions. On the first point:

Serials Solutions's Summon API is really just an API to their full-text article-search, so getting journal-title level results isn't really supported. You'd have a lot of trouble collecting a full list of journal-level titles if that's your goal. What you could do is: Do a search with the maximum number of results per page, and page through the results collecting journal titles in the articles. It's probably not a lot of developer work, but it may be slow for the end-user and it may not get a complete list. It'd be a lot easier if Serials Solutions provided a functional Journal/Publication facet; you'd do a single search, without any article results and just look at your facets. Maybe they'll be open to that if enough customers ask for it as a feature.

Also, you didn't ask about it explicitly, but on the point of using Summon to query for MeSH terms directly. I suspect that Summon has MeSH indexed in its Subject Terms field (see http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/help/api/search/fields for a list of its fields). But that there's a lot of other vocabularies in there as well, so you may get false positives if you try going that route. If you have a handful of search queries you'd like me to run for you let me know and and I'll be happy to run them and let you know how they go.

On the second question:

Yes, providing the impact factor should be eminently doable. It's probably bad design to do it all in the .tpl file, so you may want to either do it in a theme preprocess function, or I can create a hook for modifying the data that comes back from summon. In fact, I like that idea quite a bit, so I'll plan on implementing some reasonable hooks, most likely at least hook_ad_parameter_alter (alter any argument sent to summon/other discovery provider), and hook_ad_result_alter.

bertrama’s picture

bertrama commented

Follow up:

Actually there is a PublicationTitle facet in the 2.0.0 version of the API. My command-line test application was querying the 1.1.1 version of the API for which there is not a PublicationTitle facet, so yes it could actually be quite easy to pull back a list journals (maybe the top 100 for sure).

alibama’s picture

alibama commented

Aloha Bertrama,
am very stoked to hear that impact factors should work here = it's the only issue we came up with in the migration discussion (fwiw we also have an Eigenfactor API courtesy of Washington State that should become available in the next week or so, let me know if you're interested)

Thanks and looking forward to getting a dev system up pronto

bertrama’s picture

bertrama commented

Hi Anson,

Today I pushed out a commit that implements a new hook for modifying query parameters for any query pre-summon search and modifying any results post search. These hooks are

article_discovery_parameters_alter
article_discovery_results_alter

I also included a proof of concept publication-search. As with all summon results, you can't do an alphabetical sort, in fact you can't sort the results at all because you're actually searching articles and displaying sophisticated metadata regarding the facets, but it's a start. I don't encourage anyone to use it in a production environment as-is, but as I have a chance to develop the ideas involved further I expect to some day include something like it in our own site.

Cheers,

Albert