Frequently asked questions about Research Profiles

Research Profiles at Washington University School of Medicine is a publicly accessible and searchable knowledge base for exploring the expertise, research interests, and publications of the faculty, departments, institutes, and centers of Washington University in St. Louis. Profiles uses the Pure portal platform developed by Elsevier.


  • Find mentors, experts, and collaborators on campus.
  • View a researcher’s title, organization affiliations, and personal interests.
  • View recent publications and article metrics such as citations, and social media mentions.
  • Visualize collaborations with organizations, and researchers, worldwide.

Learn more about Research Profiles

Research Profiles is useful for faculty, staff and students.

Faculty should use Research Profiles to:

  • Find an expert to collaborate with.
  • Match a funding opportunity to relevant researchers on campus.
  • Establish themselves as an expert and leader in their areas of work, including research, patient care, mentorship and education.
  • Facilitate the discovery and dissemination of research findings.

Staff should use Research Profiles to:

  • Promote existing programs, projects, and communicate impact.
  • Explore organizational structure and strengthen connections.
  • Match a funding opportunity to relevant researchers on campus.
  • Discover opportunities for collaboration.
  • Assess impact.

Students and trainees should use Research Profiles to:

  • Find a mentor, make connections on campus.
  • Explore organizational structure, learn about current research activities on campus.
  • Discover and evaluate academic interests and future career goals.

Research Profiles includes faculty with primary academic appointments at the medical school.

Names, current rank, departmental appointments and titles are obtained from Workday, Washington University’s integrated administrative system for human resources and finance.

Information must be present in Workday to be displayed in Research Profiles. If you would like to include additional information about leadership roles and positions on campus, please do so using an interest statement in the Overview section of your profile.

Learn more about profile interest statements.

Update your profile interest statements.

Updates to faculty profiles like titles are retrieved from Workday twice a year. If your Workday record has been updated to reflect the title change, your new information will be retrieved and updated during the next update cycle.

New faculty are added twice a year, after information has been captured in Workday.

Citation counts and altmetrics are provided for research outputs.

Learn more about research outputs


Altmetrics are updated daily, and Scopus citations are updated monthly.

It can take up to eight weeks for new Scopus content to appear in Research Profiles. If it’s been more than eight weeks and your article still hasn’t been added to your profile, please let us know by submitting the citation information via the request form

Request to add a publication

Research Profiles only includes publications that are indexed in Scopus (which includes most MEDLINE-indexed content from PubMed). Journal articles make up the majority of the content in Scopus, but some book chapters and conference materials are included as well. If your article has not been indexed in Scopus, we are not able to add it to your profile at this time.

Organization information is retrieved from Workday. Some organizations, like centers and institutes, are not included in Workday and will not be automatically added to Research Profiles.

If you would like us to add your organization to Research Profiles, please complete the Request a Profile for a Center or Institute form.

Centers and institutes are updated in Research Profiles upon request using the Request to Add a Center form.

The Profiles team at Becker Library will assist you with making changes and updates to your profile. Please submit requests using the Research Profile Change Request form.
The form can be used to request changes to the following information fields:

  • Name
  • Photo
  • Publication information
  • Research interests
  • Clinical interests
  • Mentorship statement
  • Education activities and teaching interests
  • Mentoring availability
  • Fingerprint (only to remove concepts)
  • Lab website address
  • ORCID ID

Please note that title and affiliation data are drawn directly from Workday and cannot be changed by the Profiles team. Any recent changes to this information will be reflected in the next update cycle using data retrieved from Workday. At this time these updates are received semi-annually.

Individual Fingerprint concepts, as well as Fingerprint visualizations are generated by the Elsevier Fingerprint Engine.

The Elsevier Fingerprint Engine is a software system that analyzes the text of scientific documents to identify concepts in discipline specific thesauri. In addition to extracting identified concepts from a block of text, individual Fingerprint concepts are weighted, indicating how relevant a concept is to the group of text being analyzed. The aggregated display of individual Fingerprints, including their weights, is a Fingerprint visualization.

A Fingerprint visualization is a list of weighted concepts extracted from groups of text associated with a person, organization, or research output.

Learn more about Fingerprints and Fingerprint visualizations

Fingerprint concepts can be removed from a profile if you do not wish to be found in a search for that particular term. New concepts cannot be added manually.

Learn more about Fingerprints and Fingerprint visualizations

Request a Fingerprint removal

Research Profiles at Washington University School of Medicine is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the School of Medicine, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS).