Search & Navigation
How do I get started using Michigan Research Experts? How do I log in?
U-M users will see four options in the right-hand side of the header of https://experts.umich.edu
In the Toolkit, U-M users can choose to Edit their own profile, or choose to be directed to FAQ’s and Support.
By clicking on Dimensions in the header, users at U-M can view global research information in the same interface via our institutional subscription to Dimensions Plus. This feature is available by IP range or by logging in as a Umich User with your uniqname and level 1 (Kerberos) password (see below).
By clicking on the Register tab, users at U-M can register for a Readcube(a pdf reference and management tool) account using their @umich.edu email address. Logging on with an established Readcube account will provide the U-M user with access to enhanced features with Dimensions Plus, such as the ability to save searches, export results lists, or create favorites.
After registering a Readcube account one time, U-M users can simply Log In to Michigan Research Experts through their Readcube accounts using the Log In tab on the far right tab.
Do I need to register for a login to use the Michigan Research Experts search? What is the benefit if I do register?
You do not need to register for a login to use the search. However, if you do register, you can access these features:
- Save searches for use in future searches
- Store searches as Favorites
- Export a results list (Publications, Grants, Patents, Clinical Trials)
- Gain access to worldwide linked database research tool Dimensions, and Readcube, the pdf management and reference tool, both from our partners Digital Science.
How do I search the database?
While using Michigan Research Experts, the Search box is always on the page. Searching is not case sensitive, and each search will simultaneously bring back search results in all data sources (experts, publications, patents, featured patents and equipment). Clicking on each of these headings will then give you the list of results for that data source below.
What information is available in the search page?
The search page includes three sections: a filter panel on the left, a results section in the center, and an analytical view panel on the right.
You can refine and filter your search results by using Filters on the left side of the search page. Each filter shows the top ten entities for that filter, sorted by the number of results in the present search. If the entity you are looking for is not among the first ten, you can use the “more” button at the bottom of the list to type the name of the entity you are looking for. This type-ahead function will then bring up a selection of possible matches for your search.
The Analytical Views area on the right side of the search page displays a range of different lists and visualizations of the results. The name of any entity in this area – such as Journal or Researcher can be clicked to add that entity as another filter for the search.
We invite you to search the database by concept, individual name, or “free text” excerpt (such as an abstract or RFA) to discover researchers, understand research expertise, and track both academic and societal engagement.
What type of searches are supported?
- Multiple terms: Search results should contain all terms. Example: searching for thoracic spine will return results with both thoracic and spine in the text.
- Quotes: Search results will contain terms next to each other. Example: “thoracic spine” will return results only where the terms thoracic and spine appear next to each other and in that order.
- AND search: Search results must contain both terms. Example: thoracic AND spine will return articles which contain thoracic and spine.
- OR search: Search results can contain either term. Example: thoracic OR spine will return articles containing thoracic or spine.
- Wildcard search: Search results contain portions of the term. Example: thor* will return result terms which have words which begin with “thor”, such as thoracic, thorn, etc.
How can I save my searches?
You can save your searches in Experts and Dimensions Plus after you log in and conduct your search. In Experts, you’ll see a SAVE link in the search box after you search. In Dimensions Plus, you’ll see a SAVE/Export link in the search box after you search.
I have the option to sort my results by Relevance. What is “relevance” in the tool and how is it calculated?
The system traces how many times a term is found in a document. When terms are found multiple times, the document is considered to be more ‘relevant’ to the search. Also, if the keywords appear in the title of a publication, they will be given more ‘relevance’ than when found in the abstract only.
How can I download a list of publications?
You can download publications from Dimensions Plus. You must first have created a personal Dimensions Plus account and be logged into it. After searching in Dimensions Plus, you will see a SAVE/EXPORT link on the right side of the search box. Another option is to run a report for a Department, Institute, or Center in Symplectic Elements, the backend of Michigan Research Experts. To obtain administrative permissions to run a report in Symplectic Elements, please contact Michigan-Experts-Help@umich.edu.
What are “Altmetric” mentions?
Altmetric mentions indicate where research has been mentioned or discussed across the internet, such as in news articles, scholarly blogs, tweets, policy papers, etc. This information can be seen on the Michigan Research Experts platform “Experts” page (where results are collated by person). The Altmetric ‘badge” in publication searches indicate the level of attention gained by that publication. Simply click on the badge link to view more details about this attention. This function and data is collated by Altmetric, a Digital Science company. For more information, CLICK HERE.
What are the “Citations” buttons, and where does this information come from?
The “Citations” badge, or “Dimensions” badge, can be seen on the publications results list as well as any publications page. This badge shows how many times a publication has been cited by others with additional metrics. You can click on the badge links to view more details about the citations.
What are the “Add to Library” buttons, and how do they work?
The “Add to Library” buttons are displayed in the publication results list and pages. These buttons allow you to add the publication to your Readcube library.
When publications are added to the library, the button will display, “In Library”. You can then click on this to open the Readcube library in a new window. Registering for a login to the Michigan Research Experts platform automatically generates an account for Readcube. For more information about Readcube, please see www.readcube.com.
How can I get help if I encounter problems?
The main support e-mail contact is Michigan-Experts-Help@umich.edu. Additional support pages, including quick tips for getting started, can be found in the Quick Start Guide.
For Researchers
How much does it cost to use Michigan Research Experts?
Michigan Research Experts is free to use. The cost of the institutional license is paid for by the U-M Office of the Provost, and the U-M Medical School Office of Research covers the cost of development and maintenance.
How can I make sure my profile remains accurate?
Researchers or their delegate(s) can manage their profiles and set up their search settings to increase the accuracy of automatic mapping of publications to their profile, reject erroneous pending publications, or manually enter new outputs such as books. Look for the Toolkit icon in the header of Michigan Research Experts and select “Edit Profile”. You will be prompted to login with your uniqname and Level 1 (Kerberos) password. Complete instructions for editing your profile are located in the Quick Start Guide.
If I see something listed that is incorrect, who do I contact?
Please contact Michigan-Experts-Help@umich.edu with your questions and concerns.
If I am not listed in Michigan Research Experts, how do I get a profile?
Currently, only faculty with salaried appointments in the Clinical, Research, and Instructional tracks are included. Clinical Instructors and Clinical Lectures have not yet been included due to having primarily a clinical focus. Appointment lists are maintained internally and new faculty should expect a lag time of about 3 months between date of hire and a visible profile in Michigan Research Experts.
How often is the data updated?
Publication information is being ingested constantly from multiple data sources. HR data and grants will be updated once each week.
How accurate is the publications data for Experts?
Because the publication data is drawn from many different sources, curated both automatically and by faculty and/or their delegates, it represents the best available representation of UM publication data currently available. It will continue to improve over time.
How soon will my new publications appear in Experts?
Although there is always a lag between when a new work is published and when it is indexed by the publication databases, Michigan Research Experts is continuously updated and new publications will be reflected in Experts shortly after they appear in any of the publication databases to which we subscribe. If you’re eager to see your publication appear right away, you can add it manually...just be sure to provide sufficient bibliographic information, such as DOI. Once Michigan Research Experts detects references to your publication from other sources, the records will automatically be merged so that the publication appears only once in your profile but contains the richest possible metadata.
Who is my School/College/Center/Institute contact?
Each research unit has a contact (administrative liaison/representative). CLICK HERE for a complete list of these contacts.
Can I assign a delegate to help me manage my profile or curate my publications? Who can be a delegate?
Yes! Anyone with an @umich.edu email address can be assigned as a delegate. To assign a delegate, researchers can:
- Go to their profile in Experts and click TOOLKIT (in the header)
- Click EDIT PROFILE
- Click MENU
- Click ACCOUNT Settings > Manage delegates
- Use the name search to find your delegate and click the blue Add Delegate button.
If the delegate you wish to assign is not found in the name search, please send their name and uniqname to Michigan-Experts-Help@umich.edu so they can be added as a User. Once your delegate has a User account and is assigned to manage a profile, he or she will be able to log on and edit the researcher’s activities. When logged in, the delegate will see a list of researchers that they can “impersonate” to curate profiles.
To remove a delegate, navigate again to Manage Delegates and click the red “X” to remove the individual.
For Unit Administrators & IT
How can I get a list of stable URLs for faculty in my research unit?
If you manage a website that links to faculty profiles or other pages on the Michigan Experts site, please contact Michigan-Experts-Help@umich.edu or CLICK HERE for a list of static URLs for your faculty. Please note that RSS feeds are not supported with the new Michigan Research Experts but we are working to identify solutions to replace feeds.
What is the background technology?
Michigan Research Experts has been developed in partnership with Digital Science Research Solutions. The platform is powered by Dimensions. Our hosted site, experts.umich.edu, is managed and maintained by the Medical School’s Office of Research and Health Information and Technology Services (H.I.T.S.).
What are the differences between Michigan Research Experts, Dimensions, and Dimensions Plus?
Michigan Research Experts is powered by Dimensions, which is a linked research access and discovery tool developed by the Uber Research team at Digital Science. When accessing the Experts homepage, you will be on a website that is available to anyone in the world to view and search, but search results are limited to University of Michigan faculty and their work. If you click Dimensions on the top-right of the screen, you’ll be taken to the official Dimensions homepage, where you can search across the global landscape of research activity, not just University of Michigan.
Digital Science offers two versions of Dimensions: A free version with limited functionality, and a subscriber version offering access to grants, patents, policy documents and clinical trials in addition to publications, as well as a richer suite of analytical tools. The University of Michigan subscribes to the full version of Dimensions, often referred to as “Dimensions Plus”. For example, using Dimensions Plus, one can compare the publication output of two different institutions by discipline, display all funders supporting a certain topic of research around the world, or find a global list of publications as well as publicly disclosed grants, patents, and clinical trials from any researcher, research institution, on any topic of research.
Where does the data come from?
Our Data Management System Administrators extract faculty data (e.g., name and appointment) from the U-M Human Resource system and feed it to Michigan Research Experts to create a unique, editable profile for participating faculty.
Grants data is from U-M’s eResearch Proposal Management (eRPM) system (maintained by the Office of Research and Sponsored Projects). Data includes sponsored projects from external sponsors awarded while at UM only. When it is available in Dimensions, grants data will be supplemented with metadata from the sponsoring agency. Grants data in Michigan Research Experts is not editable and grants cannot be manually added to a profile.
Michigan Research Experts pulls publication data from a number of massive publication databases automatically, including arXiv, CiNii EN, Crossref, DBLP, Europe PubMed Central, Figshare.com, Google Books, MLA, ORCID, PubMed, RePEc, Scopus, SSRN, and Web of Science.
Through our subscription to Dimensions, Patents and Clinical Trials data are included in the database at the level of the institution. Because we are not yet able to disambiguate institutional patents and clinical trials data, these research activities are not yet linked to individual faculty members. Patents are provided by IFI Claims and include data from multiple patent offices, including USPTO, EPO and more. Clinical Trials data is available from multiple clinical trials registries, including ClinicalTrials.gov.
Why do publication numbers differ between Michigan Research Experts and Dimensions Plus?
https://umich.elements.symplectic.org/resources.html?file=quick_start.pdf Michigan Research Experts and Dimensions Plus harvest data from different sources. Because Michigan Research Experts is pulling data from a number of massive publication databases, you will often find a larger publication number in Experts than for the same author in Dimensions Plus. Michigan Research Experts also allows researchers to manually add research publication content to their own profile. These manually added outputs will appear in Michigan Research Experts, but not in Dimensions Plus. For guidance on how to add research publications, refer to the Symplectic Elements Quick Start Guide.
How are researchers’ names disambiguated?
With many thousands of active researchers across the world (many publishing under identical names) producing millions of articles every year, we must be careful to ensure that the correct publications are associated with the correct authors. Michigan Research Experts uses a variety of identifiers to enable automatic publication mapping, including arXiv Author Identifier, ORCID, ResearcherID, SSRN Identifier, Scopus ID, e-mail address, and publication metadata. Researchers can further manage their profiles and set up additional search settings to increase the accuracy of automatic mapping of publications to their profile. Instructions are located in the Quick Start Guide.
Is Altmetric Explorer based on the same publication data as Experts?
Once each week, U-M’s Altmetric Explorer connects to Michigan Research Experts via API to pull in all research outputs which have identifiers Altmetric supports. After the weekly import, badges will be visible for any output that has already seen attention that has been tracked. For more information, CLICK HERE.
Oversight, Plus Schools & Departments
Is there U-M leadership oversight for Michigan Research Experts?
The Michigan Experts Governance Committee, with representation from each participating research unit in the database, has partnered with the Medical School Office of Research to shape the direction of the tool and prioritize developmental efforts.
What schools/colleges are included in the new Michigan Research Experts?
The Fall 2018 launch will include researchers from any school or college, center or institute that had opted into the earlier version of Michigan Research Experts. Faculty from the following school, colleges, centers and institutes are currently included in Michigan Research Experts:
Automotive Research Center
Biointerfaces Institute
Rogel Cancer Center
Samuel and Jean Frankel Cardiovascular Center
Center for Cell Plasticity and Organ Design
School of Dentistry
Caswell Diabetes Institute
College of Engineering
Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation
U-M Injury Prevention Center
School of Kinesiology
Kresge Hearing Research Institute
Life Sciences Institute
College of Literature, Science and the Arts
Medical School
School of Nursing
College of Pharmacy
School of Public Health
Ford School of Public Policy
Regenerative Medicine Resource Center
Robotics Institute
Tauber Institute for Global Operations
Taubman Institute
University of Michigan – Dearborn
Univerisity of Michigan – Flint
Importantly, the Medical School is committed to opening up the site to include all faculty with active research (within five years). The Michigan Research Experts Governance Committee, which includes representation from each participating research unit across campus, is working to collectively define the process for onboarding new units.
Will the Michigan Research Experts include a department / center / institute breakdown?
Yes, but until this functionality is available, research activity reports for individual participating departments, schools, colleges, centers, or institutes can be requested through Michigan-Experts-Help@umich.edu.