When you come across an author affiliation that does not exist in the Institutions database in INSPIRE, you may need to create a new record. Before creating a new record, however, be sure that the institution actually exists and that it’s not simply referring to a record we already have, but in a different language or misspelled.

You can find the table of MARC metadata for Institutions here.

Do not create separate records for different departments of an institution (e.g. Chicago U., Dept. Math. is a department of U. Chicago). Either use the parent institution or create a record for the parent institution if it is missing. In the past we have created departmental records, but going forward we are no longer doing this.

The GRID and ROR identifiers of the institution should go in 035__a. Include the subfield tags 035__9:GRID and 035__9:ROR respectively. Note that ROR IDs are represented by a url (e.g. https://ror.org/01ggx4157). In principle, each identifier should only be associated with one institution record, but currently legacy department records may share identifiers with the parent record.

The organization’s official name, which may be in the native language, should go in 110__a with the department (if applicable) in 110__b. If the institution and/or department has a recognizable acronym, this goes in parentheses after the official name  in 110__a and/or 110__b.

Any new records created for institutions will only have a newICN, which will go in both 110__t and 110__u. The basic format of the newICN will be Institution name, city. Use the following instructions for more specifics on newICN creation:

• Use standard abbreviations (see list here)
• Only ascii characters
  • “U. Sao Paulo, Inst. Phys.” not “U. São Paulo, Inst. Phys.”
• use English abbreviations for ICN as far as possible, unless the institution is too well known under native name.
  • Ecole Polytechnique
• Use an acronym if it is part of the institution’s url
  • UNICAMP, Campinas (http://www.unicamp.br/unicamp/)
• Use the English form of the city
• The city always follows the institution name, unless it is part of the institution name
  • “Royal Marsden Hospital, London” not “London, Royal Marsden Hospital”
  • “U. Chicago”, “U. Illinois, Chicago”
• If no city can be associated with an institution and its name is not unique, the country is appended
  • “Nat. Tech. U., Argentina”
• Don’t use stop words like “of”
• Keep the order of words from the official name
  • University of Cambridge -> U. Cambridge
  • Harvard University -> Harvard U.
• If an institution is located in a small place near a large city and is usually associated with that city, use the city’s name in the ICN, although it’s formally not correct
• The same rules apply for companies

The address of the institution should go in 371__a. It can be entered over multiple subfields, and should include the native name of the city. The English name of the city goes in 371__b (even if it is the same). Don’t include the country in 371__a, but put it in 371__d and its ISO3166-1 two-letter country code in 371__g.

Name variants go in 410__a (public) and 410__g (nonpublic). These can include variant ways of abbreviating an institution, English translations of the organization/department, etc.

Information on related institutions goes in 510. Subfield 0 is the recid of the related institution, subfield a is the newICN of the related institution, and subfield w contains a code for the type of relation (a = predecessor, b = successor, t = parent institute, r = other).

If the record is for a specific department of an organization the url in 8564_u should point to that department’s webpage rather than the main organization.