How to keep your lab publication list up to date automatically

The publication list is the most visited page on most lab websites, and the one most likely to be out of date. Here is how to keep it current without retyping citations.

Why manual lists fall behind

Papers appear online months before the issue, preprints become articles, author lists change. Someone has to notice, copy the citation and format it. In a busy lab that someone is usually nobody.

Use the scholarly databases

Several free, open databases already know about your papers:

• ORCID — each researcher's own record of their works.
• OpenAlex — an open index of hundreds of millions of scholarly works.
• Crossref — the registry behind DOIs, with clean metadata.
• PubMed — biomedical and life-science literature.

A good lab site checks these regularly and suggests new papers for you to approve, rather than publishing anything automatically.

Give every paper its own page

A single long list is hard for search engines to understand. A page per paper, with the title, authors, journal, year, abstract and DOI, and the citation meta tags Google Scholar reads, makes your work easier to find and cite.

Offer citations

Visitors often want to cite you. Provide copy-ready formats (APA, BibTeX) on each paper page.

How Labsite does it

In Labsite, you connect the lab's ORCID iDs or a search, and new papers from OpenAlex, Crossref and PubMed arrive as suggestions. Approve one and it appears on the publication list with its own page, Scholar tags and a Cite button. Nothing is published without you.

Set up a self-updating publication list in a few minutes.