Research centers usually work in different areas of knowledge. J!Research allows the categorization of information the research area. It provides views for listing available research areas and showing a detailed description of a single research area including related projects, publications and theses.
J!Research includes support for cooperations which are entries that hold information about external organizations or institutions that collaborate in any way with a research center. J!Research provides frontend views for a single cooperation description and for listing all available cooperations.
Facilities are used to hold information about any appliance or equipment available for research activites in the center. J!Research allows the management of facilities by defining a name, related research area, photo and description.
Financiers are external institutions or organizations that provide funding for research projects. J!Research allows the management of financiers which can be associated to projects.
Projects are the main activities in a research center. J!Research allows to publish detailed information about research projects, including research area, brief completion status, associated members (allowing to define leader members), start date and deadline, financiers, finance level, project homepage, project logo and description. The administrator can publish highly configurable lists of projects or single projects description pages.
Publications are the key feature of J!Research. J!Research provides a complete set of functionalities for the management of publications. Next sections explains this in more detail.
J!Research includes support for the most popular citation styles used in the different academic fields to list sets of publications:
J!Research was initially designed to be compatible with Bibtex publications types, however since 1.1 release, support for other types of publications has been included. Publications can be internal or not. Internal items are those that were written with the organization's sponsorship and can be published in the public site as work done in the center. J!Research provides three views related to publications:
It shows a list of publications organized by criteria like year of publication, type or title. The publications are displayed using the specified citation style.
It shows a list of publications in a tabular format including filters by team, research area, author and type.
Publications admin interface allows to import and export sets of publications in the following formats:
Research activities usually rely on knowledge published previously. For that reason, J!Research allows the citation of publications stored in the database via its plugin for automatic citation available in the Joomla WYSIWYG editor.
This bar can be found ONLY in Joomla TinyMCE editor if J!Research was successfully installed. Every button inserts a command in the editor that is automatically replaced by the correct cite text in the configured citation style when right parameters are provided. Except for bibliography command, the citekey of the publications must be provided.
Additionally, J!Research provides an interface to cite records and generate lists of references for those users not using TinyMCE editor. They appear at the bottom of any editor instance.
J!Research provides management of staff members. Basic members information like name and email is imported from Joomla users table. Views for listing staff members in a tabular way and using a coverflow are provided. Additionally, authenticated users that were defined as J!Research members can edit their profile from public site. Frontend profile pages include personal information and a summary of the last activities the member has been involved (publications, theses and projects). It is important to mention that J!Research permits to associate people without membership to activities, by entering their names instead of selecting them from available staff.
A team groups the J!Research members into organisational entities. They are used to authorize users for several team operations. These operations are explained in the chapter "Authorization".
Management of degree theses is part of J!Research as it is common for staff members to be involved in this kind of activity in the role of students or directors. Theses as well as other entities, can be listed and detailed from frontend.
Authorization is required for several operations against the J!Research frontend. For this purpose ACL's are implemented in the J!Research helper file acl.php. The ACL's are hardcoded in this file, because Joomla hasn't it implemented dynamically.
Below the acl.php file is printed with the authorization content for publications.
//Add publications $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'add', 'users', 'author', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'add', 'users', 'editor', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'add', 'users', 'publisher', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'add', 'users', 'manager', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'add', 'users', 'administrator', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'add', 'users', 'super administrator', 'publications', 'all'); //Edit publications $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'registered', 'publications', 'own'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'author', 'publications', 'own'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'editor', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'publisher', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'manager', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'administrator', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'edit', 'users', 'super administrator', 'publications', 'all'); //Remove publications $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'registered', 'publications', 'own'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'author', 'publications', 'own'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'editor', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'publisher', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'manager', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'administrator', 'publications', 'all'); $acl->addACL('com_jresearch', 'remove', 'users', 'super administrator', 'publications', 'all');
where:
There are also team authorizations implemented for publications. If a member is part of the team (team of the publicaton creator!), the user can edit this publication.
The same ACL rules as mentioned before are implemented for theses, but the ACL's aren't checked for theses at the moment. The ACL's will be implemented for theses in the next releases.