I am a math TA/RA and my professor wants me to redo his research
group's webpage. Part of this is to implement a database for managing
the publications that members of his group have published (details
below). As he wants this done by next Thursday (Oct. 13) and I am very
busy myself and have no prior database experience and no time to
learn, I decided to try this service out on recommendation from a
friend.

For the implementation, the members of the research group would each
maintain an HTML page of their own publications, in a typical citation
format with the fields: Author(s), Title, Journal, Volume#, Editor(s),
Publisher, Year, Pages, PS File, PS Size, PDF File, PDF Size, Topic.
The only required fields are Author(s), Title, and Year, maybe Topic.
The exact format is up to me, but it is important that a specific
format is set so that when the professors later populate their
individual publications pages, the database will be able to parse the
data to add it (this should happen automatically, say, weekly?). Once
the data is in the database, there should be some sort of a web
interface so that visitors to the webpage will be able to do things
such as sort the publications descending by year, sort ascending by
title, display all papers by a particular author, display all papers
that contain a certain word in the title, or display all papers
concerning a certain topic.

The challenge here is that I know almost nothing about databases. I
have some vague ideas but I do not even know the details of how I
would run anything. I think the web server is Apache running on
Solaris, the database should be mySQL, and use PHP interface. The
Researcher should provide me with everything needed to do what I have
described (including files), and detailed instructions on where to put
the files, how to run any scripts, etc. I don't know what format the
database would be in or how it would work, and I assume the webpage
would have PHP pages containing SQL queries to the database. On
Thursday I want to be able to show my professor a sample page
demonstrating the functionality that a visitor to the research group's
webpage would have, with the only thing left to do being collecting
the pages of papers from the individual professors.

I do not have a web server myself (I assume it'll run on the math
dept's server) and in fact I only have a Windows box at home. I have
SSH access to scratch space on my professor's Solaris office computer
with group privileges. I am pretty proficient with computers for a
layman; I know basic HTML and could edit PHP or SQL files in an editor
such as Emacs if told what to do, but I do not actually know any PHP
or SQL myself.

I think I included everything I meant to say. Many thanks to whoever
takes this question on!

I could do this from scratch,but it would be a very time consuming job
to say the least, hopefully someone will have a premade script like
this. Good luck.

First of all, I doubt your university server has PHP OR MySQL on it,
so you will have to contact your sys admin to get that installed.
(They may not even do it since it is incredibly easy to compromise the
security of a system with badly written PHP programs in the public
domain.)

Assuming you get those things installed on your server, you will need
to do the following:

1) Create a database
Download phpMyAdmin and copy it to your server. Comes with it's own
set of install instructions. (Very simple install if you have ever
used FTP before)
(http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/index.php)
Password protect the phpmyadmin directory.
phpMyAdmin will allow you to easily create a mysql database on your server.

2) Create the tables using phpmyadmin
navigate to your database by clicking on it.
You will then need to create a table to store your data in.
Create a new table with however many columns you need. (The ones you
mentioned above)
Make the first column "int" and "auto_increment" (special property).
name it "ref_id" or something. The rest are up to you.
Your database is simple, don't worry abot datatypes.
Simply add a column for each of the data column titles above, leave
them all "varchar" for the datatype.

3) Learn how PHP and MySQL, and HTML forms interact.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/programming/php/tutorials/tutorial4.html

Honestly, this is an extrenely simple project, but unless you are very
dedicated this project will take at least a week or so to get fully
working. A PHP professional could do this in about 3 hours, but they
are going to charge you a lot more than $70. Your best bet is to find
some poor freshman from the comp sci department of your school, and
pay them 50 bucks to do the whole thing. Hope this at least sets you
on the right track.