Recently, the European Union made funds available to set-up a cross-national research database that stores information concerning scientific articles of researchers working at institutions in the EU. Science Connect is the company that will be setting up this database.
The system will store information regarding scientific staff (persons) and research institutions. Bot hare uniquely identified by a person ID and an institution code, respectively. The following is also recorded for each person: a phone number, keywords that identify his/her keys research topics and the institution he/she works for. A person can be an author of one article and a reviewer of another peer-reviewed article at the same time.
The database will store the following information concerning scientific articles. Each scientific article is uniquely identified by a DOI (a document object identifier), and the system also stores the title and the authors of the article. In the case of multiple authors, the position of each author is stored. Science Connect distinguishes between two types of scientific articles: a scientific article is either a peer-reviewed paper or a technical report. The system stores the citation count of peer-reviewed papers and who reviewed the paper. A technical report is always published by a single research institution, while research institutions can of course publish multiple technical reports.
The system keeps track of the different scientific publishers (e.g., IEE, Elsevier). A publisher is identified by name. A publisher can publish multiple journals to which research institutions can subscribe. These journals are given a name by the publisher (e.g., Decision Support Systems). Publishers can have journals with the same name as other publishers; e.g., it is possible that both IEE and Elsevier have a journal with the title Management Science. The impact factor, which measures the scientific impact of a journal is also stored.
Finally, only peer-reviewed papers are published in journals, not technical reports.