Following on from our February 2024 newsletter, the product development team is busy working on a number of areas to improve user experience.

One of these areas is around the existing interoperability with CRIS (Current Research Information System) to allow for the transfer of publication information. Currently, the publication records need to indicate the funding source; work is underway to remove this requirement, allowing for more records to be transferred between CRIS and Researchfish, thus reducing the reporting burden on researchers.

The other areas include:

Insights: we will be investing a lot of effort this year in improving how customers can gain insights from the data collected in Researchfish. The first area of focus will be on data exports, where there are some known challenges and pain points: the long-term goal is the replacement of the export engine, and in the short-term we’ll be doing some investigation and planning into how we do this (for e.g., which technologies we should use).
 

Improve Integration with Plum Analytics: We already have an integration within the Researchfish user interface that exposes the PlumX widget for relevant publications. This provides a live link to PlumX data from within the user interface; we will extend this integration and start to make PlumX metrics available via data exports, starting with the number of citations in policy documents and patents.
 

Platform Maintenance: We will continue to invest in the core technology platform to ensure that it provides a stable and secure basis for the Researchfish service. In the next few months this will include migrating part of our data infrastructure to a more modern platform, as well as planning some future technology upgrades and migrations.
 

As ever, we use our quarterly planning process to check and revise our plans, to ensure we remain agile and able to adjust to changing business needs.

For further details on the Roadmap or how you can support our user research activities, feel free to contact our Product Manager at c.millerchip@elsevier.com