"Research information management: making sense of it all" - Julia Hawks, VP North America, Symplectic Slides from Shaking It Up: Challenges and Solutions in Scholarly Information Management, San Francisco, April 22, 2015

1. Research Information Management:
Making Sense of it All
Julia Hawks, VP North America
April 2015

2. • We are a software
development and service
company serving
researchers and research
administration.
• We work in
partnership with our
clients to develop
new features.
• We specialise in integrating
systems, data and
institutional platforms.
• We are vendor, open
source community and
data source agnostic
About Symplectic

3. – Research Information Management systems (RIMs)
• What are they/why are they needed
• Primary use cases for adoption
– How do RIMs differ to traditional management
information databases?
• Automated data capture
• Disambiguation
• Joining the dots
• Focus on reuse
Overview

4. RIM is used to refer to the integrated management of information
about the research life-cycle, and about the entities which are party to it
(e.g. researchers, research outputs, organizations, grants, facilities etc). The
aim is to synchronise data across parts of the university, reducing the
burden to all involved of collecting and managing data about the
research process. An outcome is to provide greater visibility onto
institutional research activity.
- source: OCLC
Research Information Management

5. Collecting data about researchers and their
activities is difficult
– Disambiguation
– Data is in multiple places
– Duplication
– Assignment to a department
– Researchers are busy people!
Why a RIM system?
The real challenge here is translation of information
already in existence in scattered sources
“ Annon: SCITS Conference, Chicago 2013

6. A centralised system dedicated to supporting the
capture, linking and dissemination of information
associated with research and teaching activity
within an institution:
• Person data
• Research Outputs and Datasets
• Grants
• Professional & teaching activities
• Equipment
• & more…
A means of populating institutional repositories
A tool that supports Open Access Policies
A flexible reporting framework
Symplectic Elements

7. • Collecting and managing publication
information
• Evaluating institutional research activity
• Responding to funder requests
• Carrying out government
assessment/returns
• Growing institutional repositories
• Populating public researcher profiles with
up-to-date information
• Supporting the generation of researcher
CV’s and other internal reports
Key RIMs use cases

8. RIM versus database – a move away from
form filling!

9. Far greater focus on the user experience

10. Automated data capture

11. Both internal and external systems
Searched by
DOI
Profile/Expertise Systems
Symplectic
Elements
VIVO Scival
Researcher Identifier Systems
ORCiD
Researcher
ID
Bibliographic Aggregators*
Scopus
Web of
Science
Disciplinary Article Repositories
PubMed arXiv
E-PMC
Datasets
figshare
CINii
RePEc DBLP
Academic (or
their proxy)
selects external
data sources
most relevant to
them
Symplectic
Reporting
Database
Funding Data
Bibliometrics
altmetric
TR Impact
Factors
Media Data
Reference Data
Org IDs
Sherpa FundRef
SSRN
CVCV &
Biosketch
Data
Warehouse /
BI Tool
ETL
Research Output Sources
Open Access
Repository
Profile and
external
research
output data
CMS / Profile
Tool (e.g. VIVO
or Profiles RNS)
RefMgr
BibTeX
Teaching
Database
HR
Award
Mgnt
Institutional Systems of Record
Equipment
Other Data Sources
API
API
Funder and
Govt Systems
XML
APIAPI
Legend
Symplectic Digital ScienceOpen DataInstitution
Journal
dataCrossRef
Patent Data
DOAJ
Awards Data
API
.doc
& pdf
Google
Books
Dimensions

12. Data captured from 7 different
sources to make this single
record
Citations counts from the major
citations engines in the same place
Integration with Altmetric
Article associated
with 3 authors
within the institution
Journal-level
metrics
Direct integration with
digital research repository
Relationships to
grants, equipment
used, etc.
Result = richer contextualized data

13. The fun bit: Analytics

14. Thank You!
Symplectic.info
@symplectic
@breezier