Sweep up, mop up and clean up

I know what you are thinking, 'is he on about the housework?' (no sexist jokes please about a ladies work is never done) ;o)

Well, actually i'm not talking about housework so keep reading gents.

I received an email this week asking about advice on cleaning up the database for their manuscript tracking system. This has to be the most boring job ever recorded to have to be done within an editorial office (apart from the hoovering of course).

Over the years your journal will grow its database of users so you can have a large set of authors and reviewers, but over time people move and change jobs or even die, so the emails do not work. Also people will register on the system twice or three times with different addresses. All very annoying.

I gave my answer as follows:
We run the Duplicate record report every month to keep on top of it. We go down the list quickly, if you keep on top of it then it will take you an hour a month.
Also if we are working on a paper and see that a reviewer has been put on twice we will then merge it there and then.
We also clean our database once a year where we email everyone to update there record, this will then cause a major bounce back of wrong email addresses which you will then need to go and deactivate the records. You could discuss this with your developer on how best you can cope with this boring chore.

I wonder how others do this if they do it at all. Again I urge you to have a discussion on the ISMTE forum.

Anyway i'm off to iron my socks and pants.

Tally ho