UTSA launches comprehensive tool to manage research portfolios

DECEMBER 1, 2020 — UTSA’s Knowledge Enterprise, in collaboration with Academic Affairs, has selected Academic Analytics to provide comprehensive analytics of research activity across the institution and of the national research landscape.

“Investing in a data system that can be leveraged by our community will give us all access to more usable and actionable data to improve decision making, and it will also streamline a number of processes, saving time and effort and enhancing productivity,” explained Bernard Arulanandam, UTSA’s vice president for Research, Economic Development, and Knowledge Enterprise.

The software suite gives access to view research activity, including benchmarking, providing helpful peer-analysis and faculty-development tools, and new ways to highlight research excellence on campus. Data sources are culled from a mix of established external and internal sources, including Crossref, Digital Measures and the UTSA Research internal database.

There are three components to the software suite available to the UTSA community:

• Research Insight, targeting research administrators, helps users find subject matter experts within an institution whether to build diverse research and academic teams; find star faculty for targeted disciplines—for example, climate change, health analytics; build candidate pools for transdisciplinary positions; and identify funding opportunities. Institutional leaders can manage the entire research portfolio for the campus or individual units. The database can also help with reviews of local research teams’ collaborative efforts.
  
  
• Faculty Insight, personalized for faculty members, provides an integrated search tool that empowers users to discover targeted public and private funding opportunities and save those searches, and receive notifications when new funding opportunities are available. Potential collaborators across disciplines and physical location can be found more easily, providing an advantage when competing for federal research resources. Editable prepopulated faculty profiles are provided in which users can curate their entire scholarly work, check sources and update their profile. Faculty can also search their network to find similar scholars, study scholarship trends in their field, create transdisciplinary project teams across institutions for larger projects, and peruse honorifics awards.
  
  
• The Discovery Site is a public facing website accessible to all external users, highlighting the research portfolio of the entire university. Visitors such as prospective students, potential research partners, faculty members from other institutions, and members of the media, can view data on UTSA’s research strengths front and center no matter the discipline. The site also tracks UTSA Ph.D. alumni, enabling users to track where UTSA trained scientists are working throughout the country.

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The cross-divisional project team consisting of Liana Ryan and Praveen Askokan was led by Arya Singh. To create an account for Research and/or Faculty Insight, please contact vprhelp@utsa.edu.

— Sarah Hada

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