Research Support & Services: Faculty Research Profiles
- What problem are we trying to address? What's the proposed solution?
- How does the Research Profiles tool work?
- Which faculty are included in the tool?
- What information is shown in a profile?
- What do I do with it?
- Who can I contact if I need help?
How does the Research Profiles tool work?
Collexis' Research Profiles tool scans and analyzes all of the publications in the MEDLINE/PubMed citation database and uses the aggregated data to create an individual fingerprint for each UMMS faculty author. This fingerprint is made up of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms created and maintained by the National Library of Medicine. These MeSH terms utilize a controlled vocabulary to describe concepts, including diseases, chemicals, procedures, anatomy and more. Once a profile has been established, Collexis disambiguates author names to ensure that publications are associated to the correct author. As there is no unique author identifier in PubMed, Collexis' algorithm incorporates additional publication data to determine whether one “John Smith” is the same as another “John Smith.” This additional information includes concepts, co-authors and location, among others. To validate that this algorithm is working correctly, the Office of Research led a detailed review of all faculty CVs compared to the profiles found by Collexis as part of the initial launch of these tools.
The same process is repeated for active NIH-funded grants from the CRISP database to create a fingerprint based on the grant abstracts associated with a faculty member. This information is presented alongside the publication fingerprint for each faculty member, thereby highlighting subject matter expertise by both publications and funding.
In order to customize this tool for UMMS, the Office of Research provided Collexis with the UMMS department structure and mapped faculty to their primary department or division. This allows users to browse researchers by department, search by name, or search by topic to find experts in a particular area.
As a special feature, we are also testing the implementation of an H-Index for each faculty profile. The H-Index measures how often a researcher's publications are cited in relation to the total body of his/her publications. The H-Index shown in the Research Profiles for a faculty member is based on publications found in PubMed. For most UMMS faculty, the H-Index shown is reflective of their total body of work. However, for faculty who publish outside of PubMed-specific journals, the H-Index shown is calculated based on only a subset of their publications and, therefore, may appear different than if calculated at other sources that may include non-PubMed work. For questions regarding H-Index, please contact us at collexis-help@umich.edu.
