BU Research Blog

BU launched its new publications management system, BRIAN (Bournemouth Research Information and Networking), this week.  Over 300 of you have already logged in and input information.  BRIAN provides a facility to quickly and easily update your research activity in one place, which enables research information to be used in multiple places.

For those of you who have been inputting your information into BRIAN, you should now see your external profile pages taking shape.  Your profile pages will allow you to promote yourself for potential research collaborations, research grants and enterprise opportunities.  It will also provide a search function for staff to find out about potential collaborative opportunities with colleagues from across BU, and so the more staff update their profiles, the greater the opportunity for collaboration and seeing the benefits of BRIAN.

Don’t forget to look at the user guides in my earlier blogs.  Also, there is help available in the RDU for all things BRIAN related: BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

Some of the features soon to be added to BRIAN: Grants; REF; improved PhD Student information – watch this space!

I’m pleased to announce that 278 staff have logged into BRIAN in the first three days of it going live.

RDU have offered support to staff for uploading photos and edited chapters.  We have additional support available in the office now and so please do send through your information whilst this support is available.  It will also improve your external profile quickly.  All requests should go to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

Yesterday, I made available a BU specific BRIAN – Quick Start Guide v1,  BRIAN – Trouble-shooting Guide for Search Settings and BU Staff External Web Pages.  A read through of these should answer the majority of your questions but if they don’t then please contact BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk.  Short videos on some of the more frequent functions of BRIAN will soon be available.

The functionality to upload full text articles is available in BRIAN.  However, the import from BURO is still taking place and so your existing full text articles will not yet show in BRIAN.  Please do not upload any full text articles just yet as this information may be populated once BURO and BRIAN have finished the upload.

Once this import has been completed, I will provide details on how to upload full text articles.

Thank you for your patience.

Any edited chapters that were previously input into BURO will have been imported into BRIAN.

If you have edited chapters that are new or were not previously in BURO then these will need to be manually input into BRIAN as online databases do not currently offer this service.  Google Books may be able to find some meta data for the book itself, but not completely for chapters.  Therefore, if you only have a few edited chapters then it would be appreciated if you could manually input these into BRIAN.  Click on ‘Add new Chapter’ and then ‘Skip this step and go straight to manual entry’.  You will then need to input the details of the edited chapter and remember to save.

If you have more than a few edited chapters that were not previously in BURO then RDU will manually input these into BRIAN for you during this launch period.  If you require RDU to input your edited chapters, please supply the following information:

• Relationship type: ‘Author’, ‘Editor’, or ‘Translator’
• Title
• Authors last name and initials
• Editors last name and initials
• Chapter number

There are a number of other fields that you can view following the instructions above.  If you have the information for these fields and can provide them to RDU then we will also input these.  Please send your edited chapter information to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk and mark the subject field as ‘Edited Chapters’.

BRIAN continues to develop functionality to search other online databases so the ability to search for chapters may be forthcoming in the future.

The BRIAN full user guide is available once you have logged on to BRIAN and will shortly be available through the staff intranet.

There are two other helpful guides available on BRIAN.  The quick start guide will help you get started and the trouble-shooting guide will help you refine your search setting:

BRIAN – Quick Start Guide v1 – this has been updated with further information about publication management.

BRIAN – Trouble-shooting Guide for Search Settings

There is a short guide to the staff external web pages, which can be found here: BU Staff External Web Pages

BU External Staff Web Pages

The BU external staff web pages can be found here: http://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk   Clicking on this link will take you to the home page. 

You do not need to log in and so please ignore the ‘log in’ at the top of the screen.

Input a surname in full into the ‘Search’ box and click on ‘Search’.  You will then be presented with matches for that surname and you should select the one you want.

The profile for the selected person will appear.  All information presented has been imported from BRIAN (Bournemouth Research Information and Networking) and so you cannot amend information here.  If you wish to make changes to the information within your profile then the majority of this will be done through BRIAN.  Any changes that are made on BRIAN will be uploaded overnight.

If you wish to amend your name then this must be done through HR.  You can request a change through ‘Update your contact details’ on the staff intranet home page.

There are a number of graphs and charts automatically populated within the external staff web pages.  The publications chart is based solely on your publications entered into BRIAN.  The ‘co-author network’ and ‘Map of Science’ are currently being reviewed to see how useful these may be.

Your previous staff profile can be found either through your academic school pages or by typing in the following address and writing your username at the end.  These will be available to you for the next three weeks only.  All external queries on the BU web site will be directed to your new profile page.

http://onlineservices.bournemouth.ac.uk/academicstaff/Profile.aspx?staff=username

More information will follow on how best to present your publications.

BRIAN has worked hard all weekend and has now imported all data that we hold, as well as information for external data sources.  We will switch on the email alerts at 10.15am today and so the majority of you will receive an alert to tell you that you have publications pending.  There are a few things to note and so please read the rest of this Blog.

Can I ask that you all take the time to read through the user guides available on BRIAN?  These can be found in BRIAN and by clicking the ‘help’ button at the top right-hand side of the screen.  Ideally, you should read the full guide before using BRIAN but there is a ‘Quick start guide’ for those with limited time.  Whilst it might seem easier to just send me a quick email, when 300 of you do it, I won’t be able to send you a quick answer.  The user guides are straightforward and should answer all of your questions.

The Grants are still being imported from RED and should be completed this week.  Therefore, you do not need to manually add any BU grants.  However, if you wish to input grants received at previous institutions then you can do this.  Instructions are available in the full user guide.

You can input your keywords into BRIAN.  These aren’t yet linked to the external profile pages but will be resolved shortly.

RDU circulated an email last week to all those who did not have a photo on their academic profile page, and asked these staff to submit a photo if they wanted one to appear on their new profile page.  If you would like to change your existing photo, please ensure that it is between 250 x 250 and 350 x 350 pixels in size and be saved as username.thumbnail.jpg  For consistency these need to be a head and shoulders shot please.  Photos should be sent to BRIAN@bournemouth.ac.uk

The external profile pages can be found here: http://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/  Please note that you do not have to log in.  Just enter your surname (this must be spelt out in full) in the ‘search’ box and press ‘search’.  All graduate students will have a profile on here and so should follow the same instructions as above.  You do not need to click on the ‘graduate student’ link as we have not connected this up yet.

There will be more useful information coming out about BRIAN this week and so keep reading the Blog for the latest news.

BRIAN is almost here.

You will have seen from previous Blog articles the benefits of BRIAN, how to refine your searches, how easy it is to use, and how you can control the content of your staff profile page.  I now wanted to tell you of the benefits to PhD students, as well as the ability to delegate within BRIAN.

BRIAN will be available to PhD students, which will enable them to have their own profile page on the BU web site.  In addition to this, PhD students will be able to search BRIAN to see who within BU is carrying out the research that they are interested in and could potentially be a supervisor.  Supervisors will be able to link UG and PG students to their profiles.  There will be more information available on this once BRIAN goes live.

The clock is ticking and we’re almost there with launching BRIAN.  You can watch the latest video on the benefits of uploading full-text outputs to BURO:

Approving or declining publications on BRIAN couldn’t be simpler.  You will receive an email to let you know that you have publications waiting for you in BRIAN.  When you log on to BRIAN it will tell you how many pending publications you have waiting:

By clicking the number shown in red, you will be taken through to your list of pending publications.  You’ll be presented with a list of pending publications, which will show a summary of the publication.  You can view full details from here, including the data source. On the right hand side of the publication is a red ‘X’  to decline and a green ‘Tick’ to approve.  If you have several publications to approve/decline then you can tick a check box in the left-hand corner of each publication and then click the larger approve/decline button above to approve/decline in bulk.  That’s it!

The best thing about BRIAN is that it allows you to have control over your external profile.  Whatever you choose to add to BRIAN will be displayed in your external profiles.  This includes a number of activities, such as your biography, academic group, memberships, website and social media links, plus many more options.

As said before, full user guides will be available when the system goes live.

Please can I ask that you do not log into the BRIAN until confirmation is given that the system is live.  Many thanks.

Well it’s only three days to go before BRIAN goes live and it’s a hive of activity at this end.  You can see the latest video on the benefits of building an online profile:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kz9o9eDQRKA

One of the many benefits of BRIAN is that you can refine your ‘search’ settings to find new publications for you to approve.  You should only need to do this once but you can tweek your ‘search’ settings at any time.  Here are some basic instructions on how to refine your search once BRIAN goes live:

Click on ‘search settings’ in the ‘my elements’ menu.

Under ‘Name Variants’ add all combinations of your name and initials under which you publish.

Under ‘Addresses’ you can add previous institutions or those which you collaborate with.

If your name is popular, e.g. John Smith, you may wish to add a ‘Start Date’ or ‘Keywords’ to restrict the search.  This will be most beneficial to new academics who go by the name ‘Albert Einstein’.

 BRIAN is linked to several data sources from which it imports publications.  If you have an ID with a data source, e.g. Web of Science, you will be able to enter this so that the data source specifically sends your publications through against that ID only.  More details will be available on this in the ‘Quick Start Guide’ when BRIAN goes live.

Stay tuned for more news tomorrow.

The new publications management system, BRIAN, will go live on 22 June.  Here’s what it can do for you:

• BRIAN will provide a facility for academics to quickly and easily update their research activity via a single point of data entry which will enable research information to be used in multiple places, including BURO and the BU Staff Profile web pages, without the need to duplicate or enter additional data.
• BRIAN will allow academics to have ownership of their staff profile web pages so these are easily kept up to date, allowing academics to promote themselves for potential research collaborations, research grants and enterprise opportunities, research assessment exercises, etc. It will also provide a search function for staff to find out about potential collaborative opportunities with colleagues from across the institution.
• BRIAN will enable BU to meet research assessment requirements (particularly the UK Research Excellence Framework) by improving the administrative efficiency and data accuracy – in terms of staff preparation, mock exercises, data collation, analysis, scenario planning and meeting future requirements.
• BURO will in future only contain records for outputs supported with a full-text copy of the output. Academic staff will no longer add records direct to BURO, but via BRIAN.

Watch this short video to find out the benefits of having one system in which to enter data, which is then used multiple times:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH–vuEZlDw

There will be further guidance and helpful hints on using BRIAN throughout this week and so watch this space!