Elements calculation of PBRF Eligibility Date
From the TEC PBRF2018 Guidelines:
The EP can only contain research and research-related activities produced during the 2018 Quality Evaluation assessment period of 1 January 2012 to 31 December 2017. ‘Produced’ in this context means that the final version of the research output was first made available in the public domain during the assessment period, or that the research-related activity was undertaken during the assessment period.The government requirement above means it is important for PBRF submissions that a Produced Date is provided for each selected NRO or ORO research output selected within Elements, and that institutions ensure that only outputs with production dates within the PBRF census period are included. This is particularly important for outputs authored or produced around the start or end of the census period.
Further to consultation with our New Zealand customer base, and our own analysis of the availability of dates from online data sources, we have added an optional automatically calculated PBRF Eligibility Date . When enabled via the System Settings page, this date is displayed on the Publication Details page. Additionally, if it has been enabled for a particular exercise (for example, the PBRF exercise), it will be used as the selection date for publication objects.
As of March 2017 Elements 5.4, the calculation is performed as follows:
If there are no manual, manual verified or local source (1 or 2) records, then find earliest date from all records ignoring precedence;
Otherwise, at least one manual/local source record exists. Considering, by descending precedence, grouping together multiple records of the same precedence (e.g. multiple not verified manual records), ONLY records from manual verified, manual, data source 1 and data source 2 sources: work down the subset of these 4 sources by precedence order, looking for the earliest date;
The edge case is the possibility of completing getting no date at all, because all the only manual record(s) have no dates set. At this point, apply the same logic as part 1, and find the earliest date from all of the remaining online non-local/manual sources.
In all cases above, the dates used are the the subset of the three date fields “publication-date”, “online-publication-date” and “start-date” which are in use by the particular publication type for this record.
The technical approach to this calculation is to use the existing "Search Indexer" to do the calculation and store the answer. This means the first time the behaviour is switched on, a Full Search Reindex should be requested (via the existing System Admin> Jobs & Scheduling> Search Index Management page), and similarly if a data source precedence order is changed then a Full Search Reindex should be requested. Other changes e.g. adding individual records or editing manual records will be picked up like other changes to objects and records are and added to a queue for updating the search index in near real-time.
In Elements 5.3 December 2016, we introduced functionality for setting data source precedence separately for manual verified and I think that will help a number of you whether or not you turn on the PBRF eligibility date option.
On a separate point, we have had a request to drive the assessment/PBRF source precedence from a separate precedence to the rest of Elements / the reporting sync precedence, and we are considering the pros and cons of such an enhancement.
On the reporting date side, for those customers who elect not to turn on the PBRF eligibility date, we introduced in April 2017 an extension to the PATCH functionality of the API to make it possible to get/set the reporting date for a given publication over the API. We have (unconfirmed) plans to enhance reporting date calculations more generally in the product.