Research Support & Services: Faculty Research Profiles

What problem are we trying to address? What's the proposed solution?

The Problem

A consolidated, thorough directory of Medical School faculty research expertise has not been available to faculty and staff. An understanding of “who” in the organization is working on “what” can facilitate building collaborative teams and productive research relationships. Until now, this information has often been difficult to find and has traditionally occurred through personal connections or word-of-mouth recommendations. Faculty have indicated that access to a searchable tool that allows easy navigation of the breadth and depth of our world-class research enterprise would be a valuable resource, aiding their individual work.

An IT system has the inherent potential to be helpful, but if it requires busy faculty to manually create and maintain information about their research interests, it is difficult to keep up to date. Further, if the system is expected to simultaneously remain current and reflect the breadth and depth of experience over a career while remaining easy to use, the challenge can be daunting.

The Office of Research was committed to creating a resource to navigate faculty expertise that is easy to use, reflects both career-long and current information, and requires little, to no, faculty effort for creation or maintenance. The Office of Research, in collaboration with Medical School Information Services (MSIS), has partnered with Collexis™ to develop “Research Profiles.” In addition to highlighting individual research expertise, the Research Profiles tool exposes connections among UMMS researchers and can assist in identifying potential collaborators. This tool can also help find mentors and key knowledge holders, making connections between faculty, students, and staff easier.

The Solution

Collexis' Research Profiles use the freely available MEDLINE publication data (PubMed) as well as NIH-funded grant information (CRISP) to create a “fingerprint” of a faculty member's subject expertise. A 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. This fingerprint is updated automatically as publications enter the MEDLINE database, meaning faculty are not required to manually maintain their individual profiles.

Collexis' algorithm scans either full publications or abstracts of active grants for a faculty member and creates faculty-specific PubMed and CRISP fingerprints. For example, if you are looking for an expert on colon cancer, you can search for all Medical School faculty who have publications or grants related to colon cancer. Collexis ranks and then lists faculty by their significance or unique contributions to the concept field being searched (e.g., colon cancer). In other words, you can now find everyone working in a specific area at UMMS and quickly identify UMMS experts on a given topic. You can then narrow a search by selecting additional terms, procedures, chemicals, drugs or more. The tool opens up incredible opportunities for knowledge exploration and discovering potential collaborations by linking researchers across common concepts.