Find Corresponding Author: Doi Metadata?

Question

[Louis]

I'm trying to extract the corresponding author from a list of papers found by Pubmed search. I'm stuck as to how to find the corresponding author (not always the first/last author) without painstakingly navigating to each individual page, and finding the asterisked author. Is there any way to get this from a database using the DOI?

[Neilfws]

I think the short answer, aside from Pierre's suggestion for those articles in PMC, is "no", unfortunately. PubMed is what it is - lacks a lot of useful features.

[Louis]

I've chosen to attempt to work past this with a Ruby script. In the event that there's no asterisk indicating corresponding author then there'll always be an email address (if not in the Pubmed result page XML then on the journal site's article itself) which can be used to deduce the author in correspondence with the publisher - repo is at https://github.com/lmmx/watir-paper-scanner and currently testing it via a Google spreadsheet. Not too shabby :)

Answer 1

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

if your article is in PMC, you can scan the XML and get the corresponding author ( ref-type="corresp" )

e.g: for http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3343008/

http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?id=PMC3343008&db=pmc

</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author">
  <name>
    <surname>Hornef</surname>
    <given-names>Mathias W.</given-names>
  </name>
  <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
    <sup>1</sup>
  </xref>
  <xref ref-type="corresp" rid="cor1">
    <sup>*</sup>
  </xref>
</contrib>

</contrib-group>

[Louis]

Thanks Pierre, unfortunately only around 10% of my list have a PMCID (it's a list of ~500)

The key stats I have for the rest are PMID, and DOI (for about half)...