PubMan Validation rules

This page gives an overview on the implemented validation and genre specific rules on PubMan.

Validation rules serve the purpose of facilitating the Quality Assurance, making sure that a minimum of required metadata fields are filled; they can be separately configured for each context (= data administration pool within an institute). The aim of validation rules is also to make Quality Assurance easier for the persons in charge of the quality of the metadata entered in PubMan. If an item doesn't fulfill the requirements, defined for the context, it is not possible to submit/release it to PubMan.

Validation rules for save item
Valid for all workflows and independant from genre.


 * A Title is required
 * At least one creator is required
 * Creators' family names must be provided
 * A creator's role (author, editor, ...) has to be provided
 * At least one creator needs an organizational unit (affiliation of the person)
 * In order to fill the source part, at least the source title and the source genre has to be given
 * If event data are entered, an event title has to be given
 * mandatory fields for file locators (e.g. URL to externally located supplementary material):
 * Content category (e.g.: pre-print, post print, supplementary material, ...)
 * visibility (who may see the locator, public=world wide visible, restricted=only a set of people, privat=only the owner of the item)
 * mandatory fields for files:
 * Content category (e.g.: pre-print, post print, supplementary material, ...)
 * visibility (who may see the locator, public=world wide visible, restricted=only a set of people, privat=only the owner of the item)
 * mime type (e.g.: pdf, doc, ...)

Validation rules for validation schema "publication"
Apply for submit/release/accept item.

These rules can be customized, according to the needs of the institutes. At the moment, the validation schema "publication" is implemented and used by all institutes using PubMan. The specific rules for this schema are:


 * If genre is not equal to "Series" or "Journal" or "Other" or "Manuscript" at least one date has to be provided.
 * If genre is equal to "Article", "Book Item" or "Conference Paper" at least one source has to be provided.

As mentioned above, this group of rules is customizable by the institute. For example, an institute may define that, for a specific collection, no publications with date older than the year 2000 should be accepted. This means, that if a user wants to submit/release an item, which was published 1998, is not able to submit/release it to PubMan and will get a validation message, saying, that it is not allowed to submit/release items with a publication year older than 2000.

=Genre specific entry mask= In PubMan a specific set of metadata fields, dependent on the genre, is allowed. This is especially important, if you want to import data from another source like EndNote, Reference Manager, etc. into PubMan. For example, the genre specific submission mask in PubMan provides no "Event"- field for the genre "Journal Article"; so, if a journal article is imported from EndNote and it contains an event in its medatata, the event will be automatically deleted by the system during the importing process.

The selection of available fields for each genre was mainly based on the suggestive metadata for the genre, as well as on statistical evaluation of previous submission processes and feedback from the groups already using PubMan (EA / pilots).

In order to get an idea on which fields are possible for which genre, please check the Genre Table. Please note, that the fields marked with X* are mandatory. This means that the item can not be submitted/released in PubMan if they are empty. Fields marked with X are available in the genre specific entry mask and can be filled if desired. Fields marked with 0 are not allowed for the respective genre.