Ability to suppress info from profile

back up to User Stories: Defining features and functionality VIVO needs - September 2011

Includes the ability to suppress specific publications.

User types involved

• Faculty user type
• Researcher user type
• Administrator user type

Narrative User Story (for sharing/review/voting)

to be written

Background

Common data elements a researcher would want to hide:

• email
• portions of their education, might have attended Take A Chance University
• publications

Some publications, while often nothing to be particularly embarrassed about, may not contribute to researchers' profile, and they therefore may want to suppress it from public view. Examples of publications one might want to suppress:

• a random letter to the editor
• a paper on which an author got credit but did little actual work
• a retracted paper
• a paper suggestive of research that has since "gone down on a different road"
• too many publications in their profile
• publication proven to be wrong
• animal studies

Wish list for improvement

• Every publication object would have two representations - the imported and displayed representations
• Several “levels” of suppression based on user role or flags. A few ideas for such flags:
  • An administrator such as a department chair should be able to see all publications.
  • An internal/external flag would allow institutions to define internal and external parameters for posting.
  • A flag for printing might be useful for other functions that export data to CVs, biosketches, etc.
  • A flag for users to control which systems they can suppress from.

Technical considerations

If a thing (e.g., grant) is not shown on a researcher's profile, the dedicated view of the grant should continue to list the researcher is a contributor. this is how the VIVO developers have assumed individual preference-based hiding would work

Options for managing new publications ingested:

• new record
• delete (purge entirely from the triple store) - Often, it may not make sense to delete a publication from a profile, because if data is ingested automatically, it may be re-ingested next time round.
• hide/suppress (depending on user status)
• overlay (substitute for an existing record)
• supplement (add to an existing record)

Priority or staging considerations

From a technical standpoint, there is a distinction between hiding via context nodes – roles, positions, authorships, educational background, award receipts – and simple properties such as email address. The former is still on target for VIVO 1.5 via the "Context node-based hiding per individual" component and the design and scoping issue, NIHVIVO-3564.

Additional work on suppressing unwanted information from display has been projected for VIVO 1.6 via the "Individual per-statement display preference" component.