Case study on the Monitoring-Quality Assurance Processor-API - A tool to support CGIAR Quality Assurance process for peer-reviewed publications

Valentina De Col, Sara Jani, Max Rünzel, Hector Tobon, Manuel Almanzar, Diu Seng See, Enrico Bonaiuti. (26/11/2021). Case study on the Monitoring-Quality Assurance Processor-API - A tool to support CGIAR Quality Assurance process for peer-reviewed publications. Beirut, Lebanon: International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA).

Abstract

This report aims to present a first case study on the use and performance of the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Quality Assurance Processor (M-QAP-API), a tool recently developed and introduced for the CGIAR quality assurance (QA) process for journal articles. Whereas, previously, the QA process relied on the manual check of all publications reported by CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) and Platforms, this tool now allows an automatic, reproducible, reliable, and rapid way to assess the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection (formerly known as ISI, the Institute for Scientific Information), along with the open access (OA) status of thousands of publications at once, thanks to the integration with different Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Introduced for the CGIAR CRPs and Platforms 2020 Annual Report (AR), the M-QAP-API tool is exposed within the CGIAR CLARISA centralised service and it queries Clarivate (WoS), Scopus, Unpaywall, Crossref, Altmetric, and F.A.I.R metrics from GARDIAN by using the publication’s digital object identifier (DOI). Data collected from the CLARISA platform were evaluated after and before manual checks by quality assessors, to appraise the performance, limitations and future applications of the tool.