The Researchfish team is thrilled to share some updates we’ve made to improve the experience for researchers using our platform. These enhancements are based on valuable feedback from user research and behavioural analytics, and we’re confident they’ll make your Researchfish submission experience smoother and more efficient.
1) Automation of data collection
We’ve built more integrations to other platforms, to bring data into Researchfish on your behalf:
- We’ve extended our publications harvesting, to include publications from DataCite, OpenAIRE, and Scopus. If funding has been acknowledged we are able to automatically add them to Researchfish, including attributions to your awards.
- We now harvest publications via Scopus Author IDs. These are added to your Personal Portfolio, so they can be attributed to awards (either by you, or by our data enrichment processes).
- If you’ve connected your ORCID account to your Researchfish account, we can now use funding information in ORCID to create Further Funding records in your Personal Portfolio, which again can be attributed to awards. This is on top of the ORCID harvesting we already do for publications, datasets, software, audio, video, and images.
The new integrations have helped to create over a quarter of a million new attributions in Researchfish. In 2024, over 50% of new attributions have benefited from being added automatically into Researchfish, with around 25% benefiting from our search integrations, and around 25% being manually added.
2) More streamlined experience
- Enhanced Search: We’ve introduced an improved search mechanism, called “selector search”. This helps to avoid unintentionally using the wrong field when searching, for example searching for an award ID in the ‘Funder’ search field. This should help you find what you need much more easily!
Also, for Further Funding, the search results you’ll see should now be more accurate, which means you’re more likely to find the award without having to type it in manually.
- Progress Tracker: Designed to help you through the process of data entry and submission to your funder(s).
- Support for Co-Funding: Many awards are funded by more than one funder; so Researchfish now supports reporting against a single award instead of needing separate awards for each co-funder.
- Question Set Review: we’re continuously reviewing the question set with our funder customers to simplify and streamline reporting. This year, we’ve reduced and / or simplified the questions in several of the outcome categories, and plan to tackle more in 2025. The goal is to reduce the researcher reporting burden whilst still ensuring your funder gets the valuable information they need.
3) Working better with your Research Organisation
We know that it’s better to get information about your award outcomes from your research organisation to save you time. We integrate with all institutional research information management systems (such as, for example, Elsevier’s Pure). This way, we can collect the data you’ve provided to your research organisation first, before asking you to provide input.
Research organisations: please click here for more information.
- Better imports: We no longer require your research organisation to provide us with award attribution information. We can now also import records from DataCite, for publications and some non-publication types (audiovisual materials, datasets, and software outputs).
- Team member organisations can also share: Previously, only the organisation where the award holder was based could upload outcomes; now, team members’ organisations can also contribute.
- Access for ALL research organisations: The capability for research organisations to share information with us about your research is now freely available. This change means that more researchers can benefit from our tools.
We hope these updates make your Researchfish experience even better. We’re committed to continually improving our platform to serve you better and look forward to sharing more improvements in the future.