Boolean searches of reviewing interests

[abrownsell]

Hi,

What is the syntax for searching for multiple keywords in an 'and' fashion, i.e. if two people have the following as their reviewing interests under their profile:

Person A: fish, tomatoes, carrots, oregano
Person B: fish, plums, cabbage, basil

And I want to find a person who is interested in 'fish' AND 'basil', how do I that?

I have had a quick chat with a tech person at my workplace and he is telling me that OJS 2.2 doesn't support 'Boolean' searches. Is this the case? And, if it is, how can I go about introducing support for it? This kind of searching will be expected by my editors, who will want to combine multiple keywords to narrow the results down to the fewest people possible (we have over 800 reviewers that we intend to import in).

I don't mind a quick/dirty route to achieving this, but initially I wonder if I am simply not using the right syntax in the search field to find the data I want. Or maybe, rather than comma seperated list, we need a different method of delineating the keywords?

Perhaps a patch already exists to solve this problem and I'm too stupid to find it?!

Many thanks for any help you can offer

Adam

[mcrider]

Hi Adam,

No, thats not currently supported in OJS--The reviewer interests are stored as a simple string, so fancy search techniques aren't really applicable. Not a bad idea though--I've filed a bug at http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5396, keep an eye on it to see if this will get some development time in the future.

Cheers,
Matt

[phil]

Dear Matthew et. al.

I'd like to throw what weight we might have behind this suggestion. If there is one thing that sits persistently at the top of our editorial staff's frustration list is the inability to conduct a rational search of reviewing interests. There are in excess of 1000 potential reviewers. Our work-around for this is highly redundant and grossly inefficient. This is so important in a multi-disciplinary academic (or any) journal.

Thanks for promoting the profile of this Matthew.

/Phil
[Canadian Journal of Public Health]

[jmacgreg]

Hi Phil, all,

It's good to hear that this is a much-needed feature -- feedback like this is part of how our development path, er, develops. With enough requests, we can definitely bump this up, and try to ensure that it's included in the next release. And of course if you (or anyone else in the community) have discrete funds to support this kind of development directly though, it's always something we can contract to do immediately -- see http://pkp.sfu.ca/commercial for more information.

Cheers,
James

[phil]

Dear Mathew et. al.

I've recently checked in on the status of bug http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5396, and see that you've done a substantial amount of work on this and that the current status is 'Resolved'. This is terrific and much appreciated. Of course we are looking forward to this and are curious re: ETA. I'm assuming this still needs to pass through the Verification Phase? and how might it be implemented (i.e. via patch?). I would be interested in reviewing how this would work if a functional description is available for review (for example, now allows for development of a prescribed list of interests from which Reviewers can pick when updating their profiles, etc?).

Again, your work is much appreciated.

Regards, Phil

[mcrider]

Hi Phil,

The new way of storing user interests has been implemented and will be in the next OJS release (which is in the next few weeks); Unfortunately, there has been no interface implemented for searching reviewer interests in any more of an advanced way than it is now (other than in Open Mongograph Press), and a feature like this will not likely make it into the next release... If you like, bump this thread after the release comes out and I could give you some assistance querying the DB directly for reviewers with certain interests.

Cheers,
Matt