PubDex Gotta Track ’Em All

PubDex is the free, open-source publication index that ‘gotta track ‘em all’! Research institutions repeatedly have to assemble publication lists for reporting, evaluation, and open-science monitoring. Because ORCID, Crossref, OpenAlex, and similar services each have their own gaps and errors, this still requires substantial manual searching and spreadsheet work, or dependence on costly commercial systems. PubDex will provide a free and open-source alternative that institutions can host themselves. It will collect records from scholarly sources, help staff match authors, remove duplicates, and record where each item came from and why it was included. Documented APIs, standard exports, and reproducible deployment tools will let institutions reuse the resulting records in reports, on websites, and in their own analyses. We will develop and test PubDex at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, keeping it modular, for other departments, libraries, and research institutions to run it locally and adapt it to their own workflows.