Experts@Minnesota

Whether you're looking for an advisor or a co-author, or putting together a group of people for a multi-disciplinary grant, Experts@Minnesota's public portal is a good place to start. Experts@Minnesota is much like publication databases like Scopus or PubMed, but with a few big differences:

• Types of information: You can find publications and other kinds of research output, people, projects and grants, research units (departments, colleges, campuses, centers), datasets, and research-related activities. Any item can be linked to any other item, so a research center can "tag" publications based on the center's funded research.
• Scope: Experts@Minnesota is limited to information about University of Minnesota research.  All the people listed are University affiliates, and all the research outputs have either a University author or benefited from University resources (funding, equipment and facilities, etc.).
• Editability: Anyone with a profile in Experts@Minnesota can edit their own profile, adding missing research outputs as well as more information about themselves and their research. With the right permissions, department, college, or center staff can edit individual profiles and information about the unit.
• Access to the data: There are a variety of ways you can download the data contained in Experts@Minnesota and reuse it to analyze the University's research work or feed other systems and web pages. You can learn more about them on the Research Information Use Cases website.

There are three ways you can search in the Experts@Minnesota portal.

Keyword searches search all the information in Experts@Minnesota, including the Research Interests and Research Keywords an individual may have added to their profile.

Concepts are drawn from discipline-specific terminology. They are useful when searching for people and research associated with specific research topics (e.g., hypersonic flow, Parkinson's disease). To identify what search terms to use, start with a keyword search and note the Fingerprint concepts of a few results. Each Fingerprint concept can be used in a Concept search.

Copy/paste Text is an unusual but very useful search technique. To search using this technique, start typing text in the main search box or click on the gear icon next to the search box. If you have a block of text such as the synopsis of a funding opportunity. you can paste this into the search box and Experts@Minnesota will extract concepts from different research domains and match them to the people in its database. You can toggle between research domains and add concepts to narrow results. Scroll to the bottom of the page to download a list of people to Excel.

As with any database, productive searching takes practice. If you'd like some help, contact us at ExpertsMNHelp@umn.edu.

If you want information about people and their primary departments, or about grant awards, you're best off going to the same institutional sources used to populate Experts@Minnesota. Go to UM Analytics to learn more about what data elements are available and how to get them.

For data related to publications and other research outputs and their relationships to authors, units, grants, or equipment, Experts@Minnesota is the most complete source at the University of Minnesota. Contact ExpertsMNHelp@umn.edu to find out more about the ways you can extract and use Experts@Minnesota data:

• Export from Pure: If all you need is a simple list, you can often just filter what you see in Pure and then export in one of several formats. This is useful for a quick list of people in an organization or research outputs for a person (or organization).
• Pure Reports: The Pure Reporting tool has a steep learning curve, but it's the fastest way to get an Excel spreadsheet of data when the Pure Export isn't enough. Once you've set up a report, you can schedule it to run weekly or monthly to send you information added during the previous time period.
• Pure Web Service: If you're comfortable working with APIs, you can use Pure Web Services to pull the information you need into your applications when you need it. 
• Experts Data Warehouse: If you need to pull large sets of data and/or match the data in Pure to other institutional data sources, Experts Data Warehouse is your best choice. You can find more information about it at https://widget.experts.umn.edu/.

Visit Editing your profile in Experts@Minnesota to learn about updating profile information and Adding research publications and other research activities to Experts@Minnesota to learn about how to add or update research outputs. 

If you are having any issues or have any further questions please email us at expertsmnhelp@umn.edu and a member of our support team will contact you to provide assistance. Additionally, the University Libraries are happy to bring informational sessions on these tools to your college or department. Please contact the Experts@Minnesota staff at expertsmnhelp@umn.edu to make arrangements.