Information Systems Architect Medical College of Wisconsin - CTSI
Background: The Faculty Collaboration Database (FCD), a researcher profiling system, is used to foster collaboration between researchers within a regional biomedical research cohort and beyond. Researchers promote their clinical, research, and methodological expertise on publicly available profiles. The in-house created system is maintained by a computer programmer, and librarians provide training and promotion of the resource. Due to the success of the initial profiling system created in 2008 that featured publication lists, various groups on campus have advocated for enhancements, such as a mode to enter curricula vitae in the institution’s standard CV format, an NIH Biosketch generator, and the ability to indicate willingness to mentor.
Description: The in-house, web-based system was built in PHP and data is organized in relational databases. Faculty profiles utilize an API from the main institution’s human resources system to initially populate profiles, and additional APIs from Scopus and PubMed are used to fetch publications through author and keyword searches. Publication abstracts and MeSH terms are collected from the PubMed API. Everything in the researcher profile is searchable – including content in the CVs, publication abstracts, and MeSH keywords. Researchers can use content in their profiles and CVs to generate NIH Biosketches, and the Biosketch format is kept current. Researchers can assign designees to maintain their profiles, publication lists, CVs and Biosketches. A new enhancement allows anyone with an account to generate publication reports for a department or center, thus creating an efficient way to gather this information from the author-verified lists.
Conclusion: The FCD is well used on the regional medical campus. Of the 2950 profiles created through the HR API, 77% have logged into the profiling system at least once, almost half have entered information into their CVs, and there are 542 Biosketches in the system. In 2021, over 4,300 articles have been added to the profiles and 804 messages were sent through the profiling system.
New promotional efforts on the regional medical center campus are underway to promote the publication reports from the profiling systems, as this is something that department administrators are interested in receiving. Additional enhancements are continually being suggested and considered for implementation.
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