[OCS 2.1.2.1] Export Author's Abstracts Info

[albertosa]

Dear all,
we are running a 'big' international conference with more than 800 accepted abstracts (and 2000 submitted). As for submission process, authors should send the abstract followed by the full paper in case of acceptance.

Currently, all director's decisions on abstracts were recorded in the OCS system. For now we are awaiting the submission of the author's full texts.

However, I really need the list of authors (name, email, country and affiliation) whose abstracts were accepted, ordered by tracks. I cannot use the 'export papers' feature because we have not reached that stage (still awaiting for papers).

If OCS does not provide the solution, the only chance I have is to query directly on the database (postgres)? Is this feasable? How?

Many thanks in advance.

edit:
In the menu 'Conference Timeline and Information', if I choose to activate the option "Include Presentations in Conference Information listing", the OCS will generate a webpage that is almost what I need: it contains the abstract title and author's name ordered by tracks, only is missing the email and affiliation. How can I manage it?

[jmacgreg]

Hi albertosa,

Take a look at Conference Management -> Scheduled Conference Stats and Reports -> Papers Report. I believe it should give you everything you need (literally all non-archived papers in the system for that scheduled conference) in a .csv file. Let me know if it's missing anything, and I might be able to suggest a workaround.

Cheers,
James

[albertosa]

Dear James,
thank you for your hints but the 'report.csv' file generated (5,5MB) is far from being useful, there's a lot of text not aligned with the proper column: for example, the abstract text is sequentially distributed under several columns like 'Submission ID' or 'First name (Author 1)' and so on...

I think I have everything updated (copied all files related to 'ocs2-branch-2_1_1' from here).

I have lots of information to run out. What I only need is a report for each track (we have 25) containing the author names, email addresses, abstract titles and university affiliation.

It wouldn't be more easier to export it as 'xml' file in order to aplly a dtd stylesheet? It wouldn't be more appropriate if I could select what items to export from a checkbox list?
It's very disaponting to manage a big conference and can not give to coordinators such useful reports in a very quick and automated way.

I appreciate every help I can get. Thank you.

[jmacgreg]

Hi albertosa,

The Papers Report, if memory serves, has received a lot of attention since OCS 2.1 -- enough so that you may want to take a look at downloading the entire 2.3 plugin version (either from CVSweb, or even better, from github (http://github.com/pkp/ocs/tree/master/p ... ts/papers/ -- just grab the most recent version of those files), or by downloading the full OCS package from http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs_download and grabbing the package there).

If you are still seeing some strange behaviour with the most recent version, please let me know, and I can look into it.

We are planning on expanding our report infrastructure as you suggest, but it'll be down the road. I have already filed a bug against OJS that touches on the XML output suggestion: see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5236. Once this has been implemented in OJS, I believe the aim is for it to be ported to the other applications. However, if you have development expertise or funds to help work on such a report extension, please let us know and we can provide more timely help. And as always, please continue with more feature requests regardless.

Cheers,
James

[albertosa]

Dear James,
thanks for your efforts.

It seemed to me that the 'abstract' column was making the most damage to the csv formating: if the abstract text has a blank line - as for separation between paragraphs - the next text line will appear under the following column in the csv file, displaced from its desired position. As it is normal to have blank lines in a text, the final csv file will never be satisfactory because we will get the abstract text spread by all columns...

Do you think this is reasonable?

Well, I edited the 'PaperReportPlugin.inc.php' file and removed every line related to the 'abstract' column. Doing so, I could get a csv file with all information I wanted for now: the list of authors (name, email, country and affiliation) whose abstracts were accepted, ordered by tracks. Of course I did get more info than this, but it is better to have more than less for it is easy to delete all unwanted text.

[jmacgreg]

Hi albertrosa,

Not a problem at all. In my version of OCS (2.3.1), a report with blank lines in the abstract looks ok -- the blank line seems to be replaced with a '†' character, and the entire abstract appears in one column. So this may have been fixed already in more recent versions of OCS, but I can't seem to find a bug report, although it may be in http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=4774.

Cheers,
James

[albertosa]

Dear James,

I followed your suggestion and I've grabbed the entire 2.3 plugin version (from github). I've replaced those files directly on the OCS local folder but since then I only get an 'HTTP 500' error message !! I cannot reach any conference anymore!!

Have I missed something??
I replaced again with the previous files but the problem persists!!

Please, any help?

thanks

*update*:
I recovered the OCS website funtionality, but I still get a blank page when I try to get any reports...
As I realy need the abstracts report, do you strongly advise to update to version 2.3 even when a big conference is running?

[jmacgreg]

Hi albertosa,

If you can get by with your previous fix (commenting out any information in PaperReportPlugin.inc.php related to abstracts) until the end of the conference, I'd recommend doing that over upgrading. An alternative would be to duplicate a test instance the conference website and database elsewhere on the server (or in a similar environment), attempt an upgrade, and if successful then moving the upgraded database/web site files over.

Regarding the blank page issue: is this something that has just started since rewriting/uploading new paper report plugin files? There should be an error message in your server's error log that can shed light on what's happening in the background.

Cheers,
James