Academic Analytics Frequently Asked Questions

Access to the Comparative Benchmarking Portal is currently provided to Department Chairs, Graduate Program Directors (for PhD programs), Vice Provosts, Deans, and Associate Deans for Research. Contact Academic_Analytics@baylor.edu to request access.

Contact Academic_Analytics@baylor.edu to request analyses and reports or to ask questions related to Academic Analytics.

The purpose of Faculty Insight is to facilitate research and collaboration among scholars at Baylor University and across the greater scholarly community. Faculty Insight does not contain any evaluative metrics or benchmark data and the use of Faculty Insight as an evaluative tool is prohibited by the Guidelines for Responsible Use of Academic Analytics Data at Baylor University.

Faculty Insight is a search tool that enables scholars to find experts at their institution and nationally. Scholar profiles are pre-populated with recent activity data sourced from Academic Analytics. This includes articles, books, grants, awards, conference proceedings, and patents. Baylor also supplements Faculty Insight data with additional faculty activity sourced from Digital Measures. Scholar profiles are also fed to the public-facing Faculty Expertise Portal.

All tenured/tenure-track faculty in all academic units as well as full-time clinical faculty are included in Faculty Insight.

Academic Analytics compiles data from federal, university, and private sources going back to the early 2000s. Article and Conference Proceeding publication data are obtained directly from publishers, using digital object identifiers (DOI®). Citation data are derived via DOI®-to-DOI® linkages based on the literature-cited section of published journal articles and conference proceedings. Book data are collected from the British Library catalog and Baker and Taylor, Inc. Grant data are collected from federal granting agencies and select private sources. Patent data are obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization. Honorific Award information is derived from publicly available information from governing societies. Additionally, performance, exhibition, and grant data not captured by Academic Analytics are sourced from scholars’ Digital Measures profile.

Academic Analytics continually updates its faculty activity data. Some items, including performances, exhibits, and grants that are not federally funded, are sourced from Digital Measures. Scholars may request changes to Academic Analytics sourced data by clicking the source link and sending an email to the data manager. Other items should be added to the scholars’ Digital Measures profile in order for them to appear in the Faculty Insight and Faculty Expertise Portal tools.

Scholar profile keywords are matched to funding opportunity data from a third-party funding database. Grant opportunities are updated daily and contain roughly 40,000 open funding opportunities from over 10,000 public and private entities.

University Research Administrators (URAs) are available in each academic unit to assist scholars with a range of services designed to streamline the grant process. Contact your unit’s URA to receive further assistance with the proposal process. If you are unsure who to contact, visit the URA contact list here.

i. Search for potential collaborators by keyword or by name. In a keyword search, you can find faculty who have similar keywords to you.

ii. Visit a scholar’s Related Terms and People tab for people similar to this scholar at your own institution or nationally.

iii. View the Collaborations tab of a scholar to see other scholars with whom they have worked.

iv. From your own scholar profile page, check the Related Terms and People tab for a list of scholars at your institution and nationally with word clouds similar to your own.

Academic Analytics generates a set of key research terms for each scholar by comparing activity data for a given scholar against all available activity data. The more times a term appears in a specific scholar’s activity data relative to the number of times the term appears in all activity data in the collection, the more closely associated the term is to the scholar.

The notifications feature gives you the option to receive email notifications containing information on:

i. targeted funding opportunities keyed to your research interests

ii. search activity within Faculty Insight related to you and your research interests

iii. collaboration opportunities

You will not receive any of this content unless you enable notifications in your Faculty Insight account (i.e., you must opt in for emails to be sent). You can do this by going to the main menu and clicking on the Notifications section, and this will open up options to adjust the settings for what type of notifications you will receive and how frequently, as well as adjust privacy settings for what colleagues see about your own searches.

The display setting function allows you to limit the visibility of items that you do not want visible in the public-facing Faculty Expertise Portal profile. You can change the display settings for each item in your Works tab by using a drop-down menu that is located at the far right of an item’s section on the screen. There are two display options: Public and Internal. The default setting for all items is public.

i. Public means that an item is visible to everyone on Faculty Insight as well as the public-facing Faculty Expertise Portal.

ii. Internal means that an item will only be visible on Faculty Insight (i.e., to people with Baylor logins).

The keyword search uses natural language processing techniques and targeted algorithms to compare keyword(s) against profile data and identify relevant scholars and grant opportunities.

Contact Academic_Analytics@baylor.edu with any questions about Faculty Insight and to schedule training.