CASE STUDY

APA PsycInfo Integration with GetFTR: how GetFTR adds value to A&I services

About PsycInfo

APA Psycinfo is a personalized platform designed to help researchers discover the latest psychological research. It leverages AI and machine learning to assist behavioral scientists in monitoring the latest research trends in their specialty areas.

It provides personalized features, content exploration, and analytics tools for 2,400 journal articles, 430,000 books and chapters, and over 575,000 dissertations. Integration with GetFTR supports one-click access to the full text of global research spanning all subfields of psychology and related disciplines.

APA PsycInfo Market Research

APA carries out annual market research with subscribers of APA PsycInfo. Using surveys and one-on-one interviews the research uncovered a major pain point—lack of frictionless access to full text as well as access to new, cutting-edge research.

Researchers want seamless access to the full text of scholarly content they find during the discovery phase of the research process. In addition, they want serendipitous discovery of research articles leading to new ways of understanding psychological theories and principles.

Why integrate with GetFTR

PsycInfo was one of the first integrators to come on board in 2021 as they recognised the value in providing their users with streamlined access from search results in their database to trusted content.

GetFTR buttons were added to researcher feeds, article records, and related content, whenever the user’s institution subscribed, or content was open access or freely available – including open access articles in hybrid journals where the institution does not subscribe.

APA was up and running in a few months, and valued the support that the GetFTR team provided.

GetFTR signposts availablity of content in APA PsychInfo

How does it work?

APA PsycInfo sends DOI requests (a total which currently stands at approximately 2.5 million requests per year) to the GetFTR API. These are then routed to the appropriate publisher for real-time DOI-level entitlement checks.

APA Psycinfo uses the deferred authentication route where the publisher checks authentication when the user clicks on the first GetFTR link to access content from the publisher’s platform.

The following screenshots show how the GetFTR integration works on the Abstract page and the Related Content examples.

The Impact

Eva Winer, Platform Manager at the American Psychological Association, joined the GetFTR team at June’s Integrator Webinar to provide an update on the value delivered by the GetFTR integration. Eva informed us that

“GetFTR links significantly enhance the efficiency of research and improve user experience. From survey results, users discover articles that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and it saves a tremendous amount of time in locating full text”.

Future Developments

APA will further enhance the user experience and demonstrate their commitment to research integrity by adding retraction and errata information to Psycinfo, so that users can be notified of any updates or integrity issues at the point of discovery. Additionally, they plan to integrate with GetFTR on article references on APA PsycNet, their publishing platform, to improve onward journeys.

Alvin Walker, Director of Research Products, said

“Psychologists have indicated that one primary pain point for them is access to full text. It is a critical component of the research landscape. With the availability of new linking technology in publishing, APA wanted to address this pain point and help researchers access more easily the full text of research papers. Working with GetFTR as a partner, we were able to provide the best solution for researchers with one-click access to the research they want to read.”

APA is also planning to come on board as a publisher, making their APA journal and book content on APA PsycNet available via GetFTR to all discovery tools that integrate, making full use of the GetFTR service and scenarios that it supports.