Some federal funding agencies require PIs to submit information on their research collaborators. One component of this is a list of co-authors. At Caltech this is most often needed for an NSF proposal and the co-author information goes in Table 4 of a Collaborators and Other Affiliations (COA) template. Especially for astronomers, the ADS can be used to provide the data required for this table.
To gather this information:
1) Make sure you are logged in to your ADS account. This is important because it allows you to save your results to an ADS Library, later, for analysis.
2) In the main ADS search box, do an author search but add a date range to the search string. For example, [author:"zwicky, fritz" and year:1938-1941]. Usually co-author information requested is for the previous 4 years / 48 months so adjust the date/year range to reflect what you need.
3) Carefully review your search results to ensure that you have an accurate list of the papers published by *exactly* the author you're searching for, during the time period you need, and the publications you want to include. Some PIs don't wish to include preprints, sometimes non-refereed pubs are excluded, sometimes massive collaborations can be removed. Check with the PI to make sure that the publication list you have is what they want to include. The results can be shared via an ADS Library link.
4) Use the check boxes on your results page to select the papers to include. Click the Add Papers to Library button on the right side of the page. Save the results to an ADS Library. Make sure you Create a New Library and give the new library a name that distinguishes it from your other libraries in ADS.
5) When your new library has been created you'll see a green box appear on your ADS page that tells you that your library has been successfully completed. Click on the link to your new library.
6) Select all of the papers in your new library. Use the drop-down Export menu and select Author Affiliation from the list.
7) The default for this in ADS is to display information for the first 3 authors on every paper in your Library. You must change this to get an accurate report of *all* co-authors. To the right of "Viewing Affiliation Data for [X] Authors" use the Author drop down menu and change it from the default *3* to *All*.
8) You now have a list of co-authors on all papers but it will likely be filled with duplicates and name variations. You'll need to go through the list either on this page or in an excel sheet, to de-dupe and manually clean up the list.
- In ADS, go down the ABC list of authors and de-select the author names that are BOTH duplicated and the oldest. So if you have the same author, from the same institution but two entries, one from 2020 and the other from 2021 - eliminate the entry from 2020.
9) Export your Affiliation Data to Excel. Use the drop-down menu and select the first CSV option or the first Excel option. Both of these formats allow you to easily import the data into the pre-formatted COA table. To be extra clear, |Lastname, Firstname | Affiliation | Last Active Date| is what you need in either CSV or Excel format.
10) Open up your new file. Insert a new column between columns B and C. We do this to fit the data into the COA Table because the fourth column is the optional Email information. ADS does not have email information so this information can't be pre-populated via ADS.
11) If you haven't de-duped the author list in ADS, you'll need to do that now. See information above in 8a.
12) It's very likely you'll need to add 10s or 100s of rows to the COA Template in order to fit all of your author data. Copy and paste your co-author information into the COA Table.
13) Once you've pasted your data into the larger Table, make sure you match the font and size of the pre-formatted Table. As well, fix the font color and borders to ensure consistency. Clean up any extra rows at the bottom of the author list. Adjust Column A, as necessary, to identify whether the entries are As (author) or Cs (collaborator).
14) Save!