A NEW STANDARD FOR RESEARCH BENCHMARKINGUniversity of Kent Case Study

THOMSON REUTERS CONVERIS

Publish or perish; it’s a challenge that’s existed in academia since the days of Plato. While there was once a time when scholarly publication statistics were manually tracked on basic spreadsheets to determine tenure track, today’s global research institutions have come to rely on citation metrics for everything from research grants and funding opportunities to university rankings and league tables.

With more than 600 faculty staff producing research throughout the world, the University of Kent needed a solution that would enable them to accurately track this vast amount of publishing activity. This meant much more than keeping a tally of the grant applications they are actively submitting; they also needed to be able to link this to funding opportunities and forecast budget requirements for accurate assessment and to enable benchmarking.

To accomplish this, the University chose Thomson Reuters ConverisTM as the core of its global research management solution.

THE CHALLENGE

The amount of information R&D directors at major research institutions must now track and analyze on a daily basis has grown exponentially over the last several years. Consider some basic statistics: According to the report Building Bricks: Exploring the Global Research Impact of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Korea, in 1973, the database platform, now known as Thomson Reuters Web of ScienceTM, contained approximately 400,000 research papers. Today that number has jumped to more than 1.75 million journal articles. Global patent volumes have also shot through the roof. China alone produced over 600,000 patents in 2013, up from just 40,000 in 2003.

Now, put yourself in the shoes of a research services professional at a university. In addition to this ever-growing mountain of foundational content, you are juggling projects from teams located around the globe, while balancing budgeting and funding requirements from business segments and outside sponsors—and keeping track of every new input to ensure it can be benchmarked and ultimately incorporated into a rights protection process.

“Converis makes it really easy for us to not just keep track of the research process, but to also chart its impact on the school. We are able to record costs and which staff will need to be freed-up to complete the project, distribute information directly to the right administrators for sign-off and provide up-to-the-minute, accurate status updates on the entire process. Try comparing that to the old-fashioned way of passing a tattered manila envelope from department-to-department until everyone was on the same page.”

Simon Kerridge, Director of Research ServicesUniversity of Kent

Chair, Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA)

Simon Kerridge, Director of Research Services at the University of Kent and chair of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), characterized the process as akin to trying to “herd jellyfish.”

He explained, “We have more than 600 faculty staff producing research across multiple locations and we need to be able to accurately track not just what they are actively submitting, but also

To view “Building BRICKS: Exploring the Global Research Impact of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South” visit: sciencewatch.com/grr/building-bricks

identify funding opportunities, forecast budget requirements and keep track of everything for accurate benchmarking.”

Just as the researchers themselves are becoming increasingly data-driven, so too are the funding authorities that sponsor that research. In the hyper-competitive world of scholarly research, the benchmarking data Kerridge tracks is used for everything from establishing league tables of top research organizations to informing faculty promotion and tenure track.

“We need to have, at our fingertips, a repository of information on which funding opportunities exist, where we are in our process with each of them and all associated details, such as which faculty are involved in the project, how much time they are spending on it, etc. These all factor heavily in our ability to negotiate contracts with study sponsors, coordinate peer reviews and monitor ongoing progress.”

A FULL RESEARCH LIFECYLE SOLUTION

In choosing Converis, Kerridge and his team adopted the world’s only fully configurable research information management system that can manage the complete research lifecycle, from the earliest stages of the grant process through the final publication and application of research results.

“To build widespread adoption throughout our geographically disparate research staff, it was critical for us to have a centralized, University-wide repository that serves as the single standard to track proposal status, facilitate peer review and align budgeting needs. We need a solution that is rigorous enough that we can tell our researchers that ’if it’s not in the system, it doesn’t exist.’”

Kent’s Converis solution, which is branded internally as KRIMSON (Kent’s Research and Innovation Management System Online), enables University staff to submit project proposals using a single, centralized University log-in, submit the proposal for internal approval and to the research services department to add cost and pricing information, and export all related data into various formats and channels for internal recording and as appropriate, submission to funders.

“Converis makes it really easy for us to not just keep track of the research process, but to also chart its impact on the school. We are able to record costs and which staff will need to be freed-up to complete the project, distribute information directly to the right administrators for sign-off and provide up-to-the-minute, accurate status updates on the entire process. Try comparing that to the old-fashioned way of passing a tattered manila envelope from department-to-department until everyone was on the same page.”

THE THOMSON REUTERS DIFFERENCE

Converis is a complete and integrated workflow solution utilizing data and analytics to track the research proposal and project management processes from start to finish. As the University of Kent has found, the solution makes the process of managing research from the initial idea, to applying for funding, through day-to-day support of ongoing projects a seamless exercise.

In addition, Converis supports the interaction between stakeholders throughout the workflow, and brings an increased visibility of complete research profiles.

LESSONS LEARNED

Centralization is key. With more than 600 faculty staff conducting research in multiple locations across Europe, the ability to track progress and report success relies on accurate reporting from a disparate group of sources, most of whom would much rather be conducting research than inputting progress reports and filling out applications. To work, the centralized repository of research information needs to be operationalized across the entire organization; it needs to be seamless; and it needs to be reliable enough to serve as the single source for reporting. It can’t be funded if it can’t be measured. As of 2015, in the United Kingdom, research impact accounts for 20 percent of all of the core-government funding universities receive each year. That’s approximately £3 million per annum at stake for Kent based on its ability to prove the global impact of its research over the previous period. Without the ability to track every last research project and its subsequent impact outside academia, universities risk losing critical funding. Automated workflows streamline review processes. Major research projects do not occur in silos. They touch many parts of the research organization, affecting everything from staff schedules to budget to relationships with outside sponsors, peer reviewers and government agencies. By building the review workflow into their research system, the University of Kent is able to streamline all parts of the review and reporting process into a single electronic interface, greatly increasing the efficiency and accuracy of the entire organization.

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