Expertise Resources

About Expertise Resources
This publicly accessible portal targets expertise, research core facilities and people at Boston University Medical Campus. Faculty and staff can log in to maintain their expertise summary, designate individual websites and search for university equipment. Publication data is currently available for faculty who provide it via the BUSM Faculty Development application, or from anyone with grants, patents or publications made publically available through NIH RePORTER (see “What is RePORTER” at the end of this document). The “About the Search Results” section below has more info.

NIH RePORTER data is updated monthly, and the directions on the search page will tell you the last date of update. Default search results currently limit RePORTER to Boston University and Boston Medical Center for the last 5 years. To alter these parameters, please use the advanced search.

To get started, go to www.bumc.bu.edu/expertise


Conducting a New Search
Searches can be conducted by keyword or by person. Use the radio buttons to toggle between each option, add your search terms and click the search button (or hit enter) to execute the search. Be patient; searches can take up to 30 seconds for default queries, and even longer if using advanced search. Currently all searches are a literal search, meaning if you type multiple words it will look for that phrase exactly as specified. In the future we plan to offer Boolean searches (AND, OR, etc), and increased flexibility on search options.



About the Search Results
Results appear in tabs grouped by subject. Currently we display every tab even if there are no results. The number of results returned is displayed on each tab in parenthesis. The data returned includes:

  1. RePORTER Abstracts, Publications and Patents (see “What is RePORTER” at the end of this document for more).
  2. Expertise Summary, which is maintained within the application and can be modified by logging in. For faculty who use the BUSM Faculty Development application, this section is linked to what you provide there (updating either application will change both).
  3. Publications, which contains supplemental publications from the BUSM Faculty Development application. In the near future there are plans to connect to a larger citation repository of faculty publications, extending results greatly. At the current time faculty can only update publications if they use BUSM Faculty Development.
  4. Equipment, from the property management equipment file, visible for those who log in.
  5. Core Facilities, from the Research Core Facilities repository.
  6. Individual Web Sites (See “Logging in and Editing an Expertise Profile” profile for more)

Logging in and Editing an Expertise Profile
You must use your BU username and password to log in. While not required to return basic results, logging in will expand searches to include university equipment tagged by property management, presented on the Equipment tab. In addition, you can maintain a narrative Expertise summary, add keywords that describe your research, and list any Web sites that describe your expertise, interests or work. When possible these sites are indexed, and if their content matches searches, their URLs will be displayed on the “Web sites” tab. You can choose to add up to 10 individual web sites. Some individuals will see an option to opt out of having their expertise summary, keywords and web sites included in public searches, but we don’t recommend doing so.


Advanced Search
Advanced search can be toggled on or off from the main search page. Currently this section only impacts NIH RePORTER results that get returned. When you go to advanced search you’ll see that by default you’ll get the last 5 years of grants awarded to either Boston University or Boston Medical Center, by every funding agency covered within Reporter. From this page you can select different years or specify other organizations that may have gotten an award, instead of BU and BMC. You can also look for specific agencies. You can search for an organization or agency below each option.

Please note that the organization list is defaulted to show higher education only, but you can search for industry, foundations, hospitals and others using the search option (for example search for “hospital” or “foundation” and you’ll see new options appear).

If you want to reset your search to get the default options back, select the “New Search” menu item.


Contact Us
We welcome your comments and suggestions! Expertise Resources is still a work in progress. While we already have changes planned to improve performance and extend functionality, we value your input on what you’d like to see added or changed. Please click on the contact us link.

 

What is RePORTER?
RePORTER includes publicly available information on research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), as well as publications and patents citing support from these projects.

The information found in RePORTER is drawn from several extant databases–eRA databases, Medline, PubMed Central, the NIH Intramural Database, and iEdison–using newly-formed linkages among these disparate data sources. The comprehensiveness of these databases varies, as does the quality of the linkages formed among them. We expect that the quality of RePORTER data will improve over time as a result of changes in both data collection (e.g., implementation of the NIH Public Access policy) and the increased ability to identify missing information that comes from making these data accessible to more people.

Project files for the current fiscal year (October 1 – September 31) are updated monthly. Each month’s project files contain information on grant awards issued in the past month (some R&D contract awards may be included in these monthly files, but R&D contracts information should be considered as partial until a complete file is created at the close of each fiscal year). At the end of each fiscal year, Project Data and Project Abstract files are created that contain all grant awards (including any award modifications occurring since the monthly files were released), R&D contracts, and NIH intramural projects funded over the course of the entire fiscal year.

Publications are organized into yearly files by publication date. The current calendar year’s publication file and its link file of project citations are updated monthly throughout the year.