Research Information Management: Making Sense of

it AllJulia Hawks, VP North America

April 2015

• We are a software development and service company serving researchers and research administration.

• We work in partnership with our clients to develop new features.

• We specialise in integrating systems, data and institutional platforms.

• We are vendor, open source community and data source agnostic

About Symplectic

– Research Information Management systems (RIMs)• What are they/why are they needed• Primary use cases for adoption

– How do RIMs differ to traditional management information databases?• Automated data capture• Disambiguation• Joining the dots• Focus on reuse

Overview

RIM is used to refer to the integrated management of information about the research life-cycle, and about the entities which are party to it (e.g. researchers, research outputs, organizations, grants, facilities etc). The aim is to synchronise data across parts of the university, reducing the burden to all involved of collecting and managing data about the research process. An outcome is to provide greater visibility onto institutional research activity.

- source: OCLC

Research Information Management

Collecting data about researchers and their activities is difficult – Disambiguation– Data is in multiple places– Duplication– Assignment to a department– Researchers are busy people!

Why a RIM system?

The real challenge here is translation of information already in existence in scattered sources“

Annon: SCITS Conference, Chicago 2013

A centralised system dedicated to supporting the capture, linking and dissemination of information associated with research and teaching activity within an institution:

• Person data• Research Outputs and Datasets • Grants • Professional & teaching activities • Equipment• & more…

A means of populating institutional repositories

A tool that supports Open Access Policies

A flexible reporting framework

Symplectic Elements

• Collecting and managing publication information

• Evaluating institutional research activity

• Responding to funder requests• Carrying out government

assessment/returns• Growing institutional repositories• Populating public researcher profiles

with up-to-date information• Supporting the generation of researcher

CV’s and other internal reports

Key RIMs use cases

RIM versus database – a move away

from form filling!

Far greater focus on the user

experience

Automated data capture

Both internal and external systems

Data captured from 7 different sources to make this single

record

Citations counts from the major citations engines in the same place

Integration with Altmetric

Article associated with 3 authors

within the institution

Journal-levelmetrics

Direct integration with digital research repository

Relationships to grants, equipment

used, etc.

Result = richer contextualized data

The fun bit: Analytics

Thank You!Symplectic.info

@symplectic@breezier