A Wageningen professor’s global network as shown in Research@WUR.
Research@WUR is an Elsevier product and is based on the research information system Pure. The library has been using Pure for a while now. All the research output by WUR researchers is recorded in this system. Research@WUR is the new interface and offers a more user-friendly method for viewing and searching this output.
Each Wageningen researcher has their own page in Research@WUR. One click takes you through to the scientific output, projects, datasets and activities in which that researcher is involved.
Fingerprint
This information could already be found in a slightly different form in the old Staff Publications, but a new feature of Research@WUR is the Fingerprint keyword system. Information manager Anna Besse: ‘The software forms a fingerprint of each researcher based on their research output. That’s a kind of list with keywords that characterize the researcher. You can compare it to what we@wur does, but then based on publications. It does this uniformly and automatically.’
Fingerprint lets you search for expertise within WUR based on keywords. According to Besse, that is useful not just for people outside WUR but also for WUR staff. ‘For example, if you want to submit a call proposal and you want to know who else is working on your topic so as to explore the possibility of collaboration.’
Slick
The graphs showing the internal and external collaborative ventures in which a researcher is involved are both impressively slick and informative. They show at a glance a network or a global map of all co-authors the researcher has worked with. One more click and the articles pop up. ‘That’s only for the past five years,’ says Besse. ‘Co-authors weren’t included in the registration before then.’
Research@WUR is currently only available through the WUR intranet. The system will have to prove its worth internally first over the next few months; then it will be launched for the general public next March.
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