Summary
What is Flight Tracker?
Flight Tracker is a commonly used External Module for REDCap which instantiates a web-crawler that automatically collects data on publications produced by your institution from a variety of sources. These publications are organized by user automatically, and the system can even suggest records that are duplicates or may be incorrectly filed for human review.
What does the Flight Tracker Publication Validator do?
The Publication Validator is a linked system developed for UK CCTS which connects publications to service requests submitted by users to CCTS. These service requests contain data based on what year they were submitted, which allows the Module to filter only publications which were submitted after the service request to be displayed as multiple choice options. Surveys are distributed to researchers to check off which publications were made possible using those provided resources.
This application is being tested currently, and has been submitted to the REDCap Repo, meaning that you can use the module right now with the support of your REDCap administrator. The project includes the required formatting and a walkthrough for setting the module up and using it.
How does the Flight Tracker Publication Validator work?
The Publication Validator utilizes project APIs to import data from the Flight Tracker repositories into the project containing service requests. These records are pulled on a per-user basis and displayed dynamically when the survey is loaded. This means that if the completed survey were re-issued, new publications submitted since the previous instance would be included for review.
This also reduces instances of incorrect data being displayed to users. While Flight Tracker data is ultimately still manually verified, meaning that there are still possibilities for incorrectly assigned projects, errors should not result from systematic issues.
Since REDCap one-hot encodes multiple choice responses, and users can have dozens of publications, a decision was made to store selected responses as a single string value delimited by pipe ( | ) objects. This uses the paragraph field type in REDCap to store the data. The paragraph boxes are hidden, replaced with multiple choice options which are tracked and submitted into those boxes using the above discussed method. The default REDCap styles are used to create a cohesive visual feel an familiar interaction.
For more details on REDCap External Modules, check our post: