Publiton – Auto Publication Updater

Description

Stop copy-pasting your publication list. Publiton builds it for you and keeps it up to date, automatically.

Enter your ORCID iD (or OpenAlex author ID, or just your name) once. The plugin fetches your publications from OpenAlex — the open catalog of the global research ecosystem — and renders a clean, collapsible, year-grouped list anywhere on your site via a shortcode or block. New papers appear by themselves.

Features

• Zero maintenance — the list refreshes itself (cached for 24 hours, with a resilient fallback if the API is ever unreachable).
• Shortcode and block — use [publiton_publications] or the “Publication List” block.
• Clean, theme-friendly output — collapsible year sections, your name highlighted, publication counts.
• Real-world curation tools — hide noise (datasets, peer reviews, errata…), hide specific titles, correct publication years for online-first papers, and add publications OpenAlex doesn’t index yet. Manual entries deduplicate automatically once OpenAlex catches up.
• No account, no API key — OpenAlex is free and open.

Why OpenAlex?

Google Scholar has no API and blocks scrapers. ORCID only shows what authors maintain by hand. OpenAlex indexes the same literature as the commercial databases, is fully open, and stays current — the best available source for an always-up-to-date list.

External services

This plugin relies on the OpenAlex API (api.openalex.org) to build the publication list. OpenAlex is a free, open catalog of scholarly works operated by OurResearch. Without this service the plugin cannot fetch publication data.

What data is sent, and when:

• When you look up your author profile on the settings page, the search input you typed (a name, ORCID iD, or OpenAlex author ID) is sent to OpenAlex to find matching author profiles.
• When the public publication list is (re)built — at most once per 24 hours, thanks to caching — the configured OpenAlex author ID is sent to fetch that author’s list of works.
• Every API request also includes the contact email address configured on the settings page (it defaults to the site admin email). OpenAlex recommends this (“polite pool”) to identify API users and provide faster, more reliable service. It is only shared with OpenAlex and never displayed on your site.
• All requests are made server-side. No data about your site’s visitors is ever sent to OpenAlex.

Service provider: OpenAlex / OurResearch — Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, legal overview.