Today the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS) and the School of Medicine Office of the Dean are launching a pilot of a faculty profile information system called Profiles at Washington University School of Medicine (profiles.wustl.edu). Profiles is a publicly accessible and easily searchable knowledge base for exploring the expertise and research interests of the faculty, departments, institutes and centers of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. It uses the Pure portal platform developed by Elsevier, and during the pilot phase that runs through October 2019, will contain profiles of over 2,000 faculty at the School of Medicine.
The pilot of Profiles is being funded jointly by ICTS and the School of Medicine Office of the Dean. Becker Library is working with Elsevier on Profiles implementation and data population in addition to providing demonstrations, answering questions, and gathering feedback to help determine whether to adopt the platform beyond the pilot year.
Faculty, staff and students are invited and encouraged to help evaluate the portal during the pilot period by examining profiles for accuracy (use this form to submit any change requests) and exploring the portal’s potential for identifying experts and potential collaborators. Interim feedback may be provided via this form, which can also be located within the portal. Final feedback will be solicited via a brief survey to be distributed in the fall.
Profiles offers myriad benefits to faculty and departments, as detailed below.
- Departments and faculty get a central location for storing information on faculty research interests, publications and collaborations.
- New publications are added weekly to each profile as they become available in Elsevier’s Scopus database.
- School of Medicine faculty members, postdoctoral fellows and students can easily find experts and potential collaborators on campus using a name, department, keyword or concept search.
- Information stored in Profiles can be extracted for other internal uses including data warehouses, spreadsheets, reporting tools, and department and staff web pages (e.g. WUPS) to eliminate redundant data management.
- Easy visualization and reporting of research collaborations among individual faculty members and departments within the School of Medicine.
- Easy-to-use interface for visualization of institutional collaborations with organizations worldwide.
- A single, consistent and accurate public-facing presence for commercial or non-profit entities to identify potential Washington University collaborators.
Beyond faculty profiles, the Pure platform has the ability to track other research-related information such as grants, equipment and core facilities. It also has extensive tools for creating and distributing custom reports. These features are not fully available during the pilot period but could offer significant benefits if the system is adopted.
See the Profiles at WUSM Flyer and FAQ to learn more about Profiles.
For more information, or to schedule a demonstration for your department or group, please contact the Profiles team at profiles@wustl.edu.