By now, many campus community members have heard of the university's new searchable web portal, intended to showcase Illinois research expertise and connect investigators to potential collaborators: Illinois Research Connections (IRC) BETA. Following an internal-only launch last fall, the online tool just became available to the general public earlier this month.
So have you checked out what the Elsevier-powered web portal can do? Find your own profile at www.experts.illinois.edu.
Illinois Research Connections BETA is a jointly-sponsored undertaking of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the University Library. Intended as a discovery and networking tool, IRC BETA currently provides profiles for more than 1,800 tenure-system STEM and social science faculty and non-tenure track institute researchers at Illinois. It will grow to include all disciplines at Illinois, including the arts and humanities. IRC BETA updates research outputs data on a weekly basis, referencing Elsevier’s Scopus publications database.
The portal has the potential to be even more useful in the future, with the capability of adding patent and grant information for individual researchers. IRC could be a one-stop shop for media and communications staff in writing news stories, promoting research via social media, and for developing marketing collateral.
Now, it’s up to UI faculty and researchers to enhance and personalize their individual profiles. Since each expert's current profile has been auto-generated from various databases, experts are strongly encouraged to review and edit their profile for accuracy, too. Step-by-step guidance and FAQs about logging into IRC BETA and editing individual profiles is available here.
Research experts can assign a proxy to edit and maintain their profile, as well. The FAQs explain this in detail, or you can email irc-help@illinois.edu with any questions along the way.