Background

The Danish National Research Database is a central portal for published Danish research. The database currently covers published literature, such as scientific articles, PhD. theses, conference presentations and lecture notes, as well as published information. The goal for the database is to also cover information about research projects in the near future.

The database is based on data harvested from mainly universities but all institutions of higher education, government research institutes, research councils and other public institutions carrying out research can become data providers. All data providers are participating on a voluntary basis. The number of data providers is growing and new data providers are being added continuously.

The initiative behind the research database also seeks to participate in international initiatives that can help develop the database and expose Danish research to a wider and international audience.

Who is behind it?

The database has been established by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, and is part of Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF) - behind DEFF are the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture. The day-to-day running of the database is maintained by the Project Management of the database.

Easy to find

In the last couple of years, the Danish universities and other research institutions have implemented Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) for collecting and documenting their research output. The aim of The Danish National Research Database is to provide a central access to all local CRIS thereby giving all interested parties an easy and collected access to published Danish research.

Through the Danish National Research Database it is easy to obtain an overview of research in different areas - knowledge which can be used in research environments and in industry and public research planning.

The database can be used for different purposes, for instance:

  • Identify expertise within a specific subject area to find partners or get useful contacts.
  • Get valuable background information for setting up priorities for science policy planning.
  • Get an overview of the research activities of a specific research institute.
  • Identify published research within a given subject, by a given person or by a given institute.

The users of the Danish National Research Database comprise researchers, administration and management, the business community, the press, teachers, information specialists and the interested citizens.

NB! The Danish National Research Database is currently not covering Danish research fully and thus it is strongly recommended to use other sources in addition to The Danish National Research Database when making inquiries into the above stated purposes.

Data providers

As of the 23rd July 2010 The Danish National Research Database is harvesting data from:

Data providers, old records

This list comprises the data providers that cannot yet be harvested directly and therefore do not have updated data in the research database.

Become a data provider

Any Danish university, institution of higher education, government research institute, research council or other Danish public institutions carrying out research can become a provider of data to the Danish National Research Database, and thereby take advantage of the possibilities provided by the database in regards to dissemination of research information nationally and internationally.

To become a supplier to The Danish National Research Database your local database system must support the Open Archives-protocol OAI-PMH, in order for data to be harvested and updated directly from your system. Likewise, data must be supplied in XML and support the latest version of the exchange format MXD.

For more detailed information, please contact the Danish National Research Database project management.

The National Exchange Formats

Available from this page is the current version of the national exchange format for documents, DDF-MXD. The metadata format is to be used when supplying publication data to The Danish National Research Database.

The exchange format is a central part of a set of changes of The Danish National Research Database - it is the aim to improve the quality of search functionalities as well as to reduce the current costs of maintaining the database.

With the DDF-MXD format it is possible to coordinate and index the harvested data with high precision and consistency. This will help improve search and display options as well as the options to search and compare results across different data providers. Furthermore, the maintenance of The Danish National Research Database will be highly improved and the local control of own data will be stronger when data is supplied in a joint format which can easily be imported without requiring post analysis and data conversion. The new format is specified in XML, whereas the check of data supplies (XML schema validation) as well as the supplying method (Open Archives metadata harvesting) can be automated.

The current MXD format and the accompanying schema are:

For validation of records it is recommended to use a recent XML-validator (note! it must be able to handle 3-character language codes as specified in the latest W3C XML-standards).

Below we recommend a couple of free, usable and well tested validators for download:

To test only a couple of single records we also recommend the following online-validators:

Please note that the XML-elements must strictly follow the order as specified in the MXD format or a validation will not succeed. For assistance to this you can download a XLST style sheet for sorting the elements from:

The three MXD examples mentioned at the end of the format description are fully validated and can be retrieved from:

Open Access

Overview of the Open Access content of the Danish National Research Database.

A selection of The Danish National Research Database's publication types. See search codes for a complete list.

Data provider Journal articles Conference papers PhD Theses Working papers Total
Aalborg University 410 1159 295 713 3972
Aarhus University 957 208 50 712 2902
Copenhagen Business School* 0 0 0 0 0
Technical University of Denmark 2833 2034 694 0 7479
Royal Danish Defence College 7 3 0 0 103
Aarhus School of Business, University of Aarhus 222 32 16 492 1026
Hvidovre Hospital 9 0 4 0 17
IT University of Copenhagen 2 4 0 0 8
University of Copenhagen 689 42 107 263 1610
Universtiy of Copenhagen Faculty of Life Sciences 3 0 2 0 43
READ - Research in Architecture and Design 34 17 6 8 138
Roskilde University 117 61 34 132 681
University of Southern Denmark 100 42 10 26 298

* Copenhagen Business School currently do not provide access to the content of their Open Access repository trough their research database (Research@cbs) which is the source for the Danish National Research Database. However all Open Access full texts can be searched and found at http://openarchive.cbs.dk/