Esploro enables the automatic creation and update of researcher profiles, displaying researchers’ publications, achievements and academic activities in one location. Researchers benefit from an effortless way to present their work to the world, attract funders, and facilitate collaboration, while institutions enhance their academic reputation.
Pre-populating researcher profiles
Institutions can create an online portal that exposes researchers’ expertise, featuring researcher profiles from all disciplines.
Profiles are created and continuously updated based on intelligent capture of assets from multiple external sources, including Ex Libris Central Discovery Index (CDI), disciplinary repositories, and national repositories. Profiles reference the various types of research assets produced by researchers at the institution, including publications, related data sets, conference proceedings, dissertations, blogs, and media mentions.
An embedded approval workflow helps researchers and libraries validate researcher profiles and manually edit as needed. Advanced machine learning techniques facilitate author disambiguation, enabling Esploro to automatically match the right author to research assets.
Comprehensive analytics
Esploro presents scholars and the research office with metrics related to the impact of researchers’ work and statistics on their public profile views. Metrics include:
- Profile and output views
- Impact of researchers’ publications and related activities (grants, awards, conference presentations, etc.)
- Cross-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration
Esploro integrates with multiple metrics systems, and can display Altmetrics KPIs, citation metrics, and journal metrics.
Promote researcher profiles to facilitate partnerships
Public profiles play a key role in facilitating collaboration with other scholars as well as partnerships with commercial companies.
Esploro helps universities and scholars quickly showcase researcher profiles, with minimal effort from researchers and research office administrators. Maintaining researcher profiles in one location, connected to a researcher’s publications and work and easily discoverable on the web allows institutions to open doors to new opportunities and connections. Researchers can go beyond their personal networks to showcase their expertise to other researchers, funders, and businesses. Esploro also allows scholars to maintain one profile by having their profile synced with external profiles such as ORCID.
Data to enrich other academic systems
The ideal research profiles system should give leaders insight into the impact of their institution’s research. Provosts, deans, research office staff, and others should be able to glean insights that go beyond just how many papers their faculty have published in academic journals and how often these papers have been cited.
Esploro integrates with other services in the academic ecosystem through open APIs, allowing institutions to automatically enrich their systems with data from researcher profiles. Services that can benefit from data enrichment include faculty assessment review systems, funding services (e.g. Pivot and Research Professional), Research Administration Systems, and Article Processing Charges requests.
Use Case: University of Denver
The University of Denver used to have separate systems for storing faculty research and showcasing faculty profiles. But these two systems were not connected, which required faculty to enter their research in two different places. Not surprisingly, “we have had very slow uptake in faculty wanting to engage with that,” says Dean of Libraries Michael Levine-Clark.
Even faculty who were depositing their research were doing so inconsistently, often with incomplete metadata. University leaders also wanted the ability to capture a broad range of faculty outputs, including creative works—something that wasn’t easy with the systems they had in place.
Levine-Clark and his colleagues were determined to find a better solution. “Esploro happened to come along at just the right time, as we were beginning those conversations,” he says.
The University of Denver has joined other leading research universities from around the world in becoming early adopters of Esploro and benefiting from a single, unified system for storing and disseminating many different kinds of faculty outputs, with automated processes for capturing information.
“It’s important for us to present this as less work for our faculty, not more,” he says. “If we can tell them that we’ll automatically populate their faculty profile pages with information generated by the system, and all they have to do is review and approve this information, that’s a key way we can provide value for them.”
