Symplectic

Elements is a single point of organisation, presentation, and reporting for all scholarly and research activities. From publications and research data to grants, teaching and professional activities, everything an individual, department, or college does can be captured to create a complete picture of an institution.

The core functionality of Elements is the continuous, automated capture of research output data from multiple internal and external sources, using simple workflows to reduce the administrative burden on researchers and librarians. Integrations with other institutional systems help to reduce the burden of rekeying and re-entry of information, saving valuable researcher time and improving engagement.

The benefits of raising research visibility shouldn’t come at the cost of more effort and time on the part of your researchers. Our Discovery module is a public search and discovery layer for your Elements user profiles, that minimises the effort required to create a professional, scalable and easily maintained public presence.

Alternatively, using its powerful API and our rich data sources, Elements is also able to populate existing public-facing profiles for institutional websites (for example, the Natural History Museum) or the open source interdisciplinary collaboration network VIVO and online researcher networking and discovery tool Profiles RNS.”

Internal and external faculty reviews are a crucial part of the operation of any modern research institution. These regular activity and performance reviews have typically been time-consuming, involving the manual entry of data into different systems, and to some extent, relying on paper documents.

The Assessment Module repurposes data already native within Elements to streamline these reviews. This gives those performing the reviews the ability to link directly to Elements data (eg. publications or other activities), add ratings and commentary, and share reviews from others – eliminating a great deal of manual entry and much of the paperwork.

Institutions also can define and customise the nature of these reports to produce a diverse array of structured review documents. 

As more and more institutions around the world implement Open Access policies, researchers increasingly have to use multiple systems to comply and engage with them. Administrators and faculty leaders are also burdened with managing and measuring this engagement, which is often time-consuming and difficult.

Symplectic’s pioneering Open Access solutions provide a single, intuitive interface that allows researchers and administrators to deal with these challenges quickly and easily.

Tracking the deposit of publications into Open Access repositories, visualising gaps in engagement, and recognising OA advocates within departments are just some of the applications of this industry-leading set of tools.

Institutions will always need to know as much as possible about their research performance and outputs. This is critical for faculty evaluation, reporting to funders, and recording evidence for research impact. Easily extracting insight from data isn’t always possible without significant technical ability and effort, while reporting needs often vary between institutions and departments.

Elements provides a robust reporting framework around high-quality data, to give administrators the ability to create bespoke report templates. Its visualisation capabilities allow the presentation of data in a consumable, easily-understandable format.

This extensive functionality is critical for institutions to understand and demonstrate the relationships between research activity, outputs, grants and more. Combined with analysis tools like Dimensions for Universities, Elements can automatically link publications with their respective grants, causing a significant reduction in administrative workload.

In recent years, more and more funding agencies have started to ask institutions and researchers to provide qualitative evidence of societal, economic and environmental impact generated as a result of externally funded research. For many disciplines, evidence of the wider effects of impact can’t always be captured via traditional metrics.

The Impact Module allows users to capture not only evidence of impact (whether documents or web links), but also, write a narrative explaining the relevance and context of it. Built over time, these can develop into valuable resources that don’t have to be retrospectively patched together when reporting to funders.