3,200 publications, none of them typed by hand.

ESTG, part of Politécnico do Porto, asked me for a platform that brought ORCID data into the website of CIICESI, its research centre. As a research centre, CIICESI is required by law to make that information public, and there was a deadline to present it to the right institutions.

The brief was clear, and so was the clock: three months from the first meeting to launch, design included.

Starting from the researchers

ORCID wasn’t optional, so I started there. Before deciding anything else, I had to understand how its API works and what it sends back.

ORCID organizes publications by person, so the site does too. Each researcher is an entry in Craft with an ORCID ID, and publications, projects and profile details connect back to that entry. The researcher is the source of truth.

Events, news and projects are content the team writes itself. They’re ordinary Craft sections, next to the researchers.

One button to update everything

Updating is deliberately simple. Someone on the team goes into Craft and presses a button. For every researcher in the CMS, a custom module asks ORCID for their record, using their ORCID ID, and Craft’s Feed Me imports the result.

It runs in two steps. First the profile: name, biography, links and other research identifiers come from ORCID, so the team doesn’t type them either. Then the publications, fetched in batches of 100.

The work was in the duplicates. A paper written by three people at the centre appears in three ORCID records, and sometimes more than once in the same record. The module groups publications by DOI, keeps the version each researcher marked as preferred, and links one publication to every co-author from the centre. Authors from outside the centre are kept as names. Publications without a DOI are kept by their ORCID code, so nothing is lost.

What visitors see

The publication library can be searched as you type and filtered by researcher, type and year, without reloading the page (Sprig does that part). The filters only offer types and years that actually have publications, and the address updates as you filter, so a filtered list can be shared.

Each researcher’s profile has the same library, already filtered to their own work. Anyone looking at the centre can see who the researchers are and what they’ve published in a couple of clicks.

Three months, then the team’s

I designed and built the site. The content (profiles, events, news) was the client’s, and their team entered it into the structure I set up.

It went live three months after the first meeting, in time for the deadline. Since then the team has run it on its own, and we have an annual maintenance agreement. The publications have grown to more than 3,200, and the same Craft install now also runs a second ESTG site, for its Industry Business School.