Research Administration

UTMB Research Experts is a public-facing interface that captures and displays research output and external research awards.  The portal will allow you to:

• See a researcher's recent publications, and view article metrics such as citations, news mentions or Mendeley readers
• Find/Identify potential collaborators
• Search for collaborators by topic - enter a keyword into the search
• Analyze a block of text and find researchers with related work- enter a block of text into the search box
• Discover what external funding has been obtained on campus.

Research Experts includes UTMB postdoctoral fellows/trainees and research faculty.  The database does not include those individuals who have clinical or educational titles only.

Research Experts consists of the public-facing portal and an administrative portal which includes profile editing tools.  For access to the administrative portal, please email Research Experts Support.  Administrative portal access allows you to make changes to the user’s profile such as adding/editing activities, adding non-Scopus indexed publications, adding ORCiD, etc.

Research Experts can edit or add information in the following fields of their profiles:

• Add new research output such as articles, meeting abstracts, books, chapters, posters and more.Remember that research output now also includes videos (i.e. YouTube, Ted Talks), presenting scholarly webinars and other activities.
• Add editorial and membership responsibilities.
• Add public engagement opportunities including conference participation, invited talks, policy lectures, etc.
• Include significant prizes/awards you have earned.
• Add ORCiD.

• The portal is maintained through Research Services under the Vice President of Research with support from the Office of the Provost.
• Those with questions can contact Research Experts Support.

• Names, current rank, some titles, contact information and primary department are populated from UTMB records and other internal sources through POWER.
• Grant Award and Education data are also updated through POWER.
• Research output and citation counts are captured from Scopus (Elsevier).
• “Fingerprints,” or key topics, are associated with each profile, generated by Elsevier based on a researcher’s output.
• Social media mentions are noted through PlumX and Altmetric.

• Job descriptions, education and grant award data is updated nightly via POWER.
• Publications are updated weekly via Scopus. (Once a profile is established*) Scopus is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.
  • *By contract UTMB is only allowed three times a year to establish and “refine” profiles.This is when all the data updated by Elsevier is initially added.This is typically done at the end of January, May and August.For example, a research faculty member hired in June will see their publications and citations in September.
• Citation data is updated monthly.
• Social media analytics (PlumX and Altmetric) are updated daily.
• All other updates (activities, non-Scopus indexed publications, etc.) can be added by the user or a user-delegate.

Google Scholar is an open-access way of distributing information about scholarship.

However, the absence of quality control in this tool can be an issue. Sometimes a publication will show up in Google Scholar multiple times, due to subtle differences.  This seems to occur with highly cited publications. This can artificially amplify the citation count seen in Google Scholar versus what you will see through Research Experts. The Scopus-based citation count refines publications to ensure they only appear once.

The Scopus-generated H-index is more reliable and will generally be lower for every investigator than the Google Scholar H-index.

For information, please see the following articles:

Google Scholar is manipulatable 

Sneaked references: Cooked reference metadata inflate citation counts 

Comparing Google Scholar Citations with Other Citation Metrics

There may be times when an Expert needs to delegate another person to assist in updating their Experts profile.  User delegates can be set in cases such as this.  If you need or need to delegate access to a delegate user, please email Research Experts Support.