Web service architecture for scholarly publication

Abstract

The main objective of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Malaysia is to become the world class university. An academic staff in a university will be assessed according to their performance metrics that consists of based on teaching performance, research performance and supervision performance. It is important for academic staff to publish as much as possible in scholarly publication activities. But, not all researchers are capable to produce scholarly publication within university target. Scholarly publication is a competitive and critical phase for researchers. The aim of this study is to assemble the incorporation of web service concept in term of architecture, development methodology and the reuse of web service itself in term of integrating them with the established information provider company. The use of Service Oriented Modelling and Architecture (SOMA) is viewed as a widely used architecture in industry that focusing on the reusing of services and provides flexibility to use legacy applications. An interview was organized to investigate the scenario and elicit the challenges in achieving the publication target of scholarly publication among academicians. The preliminary results show that identifying a suitable journal to be published on is a tiresome task. Besides, it is intricate to distinguish the journal’s quartile and its impact factor (IF). This scenario affect academician’s performance metrics target for particular year. The web service architecture was extracted from six prior literature reviews of web service based architectures and four services oriented modelling techniques. The proposed web service architecture was integrated with Elsevier Scopus APIs, Elsevier ScienceDirect APIs, SCImago XML web service and Web of Science OpenURL Resolver web service. The research proposed a solution in the form of a prototype, which would serves as web service architecture in monitoring scholarly publication performance. Validation of the usability of prototype is conducted using User Acceptance Testing (UAT) among academicians in Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.