Scholars at Mount Sinai: Group Maintenance: Maintenance Tasks for Scholars Editors

It is suggested that Scholars Editors complete the following tasks regularly to ensure up-to-date metrics at the individual, research unit, and departmental level:

1. Add any new researchers to your unit who are newly affiliated with your department, institute, or center. See the “Adding & Removing Researchers from Groups” instructional article found in this guide.

2. "Suppress" any researchers from your research unit who are no longer affiliated with your department, institute, or center. See the "Suppressing a Scholars Profile" instructions found below.

3. Ensure Scholars ID is added to the SinaiCentral e-Directory (EDIR) for any researchers added to the Research Unit. See further instructions available on "Adding Scholars IDs to Sinai Central."

Need assistance with any of these tasks? We are glad to help at scholars@mssm.edu.

Our policy for information management within the Scholars admin portal encourages the retention of all key information. As such, the following steps for profile suppression are required when making a profile inactive, thus removing its visibility from the ISMMS Scholars Portal public website.

Suppressing a Mount Sinai-affiliated researcher profile

• To begin, log in to the Scholars admin portal (backend): https://scholars.mssm.edu/admin/ [Note: single sign-on has been enabled for this login. Please use your Mount Sinai email and network password as the login credentials for the admin portal]. 
• Select the Master Data tab from the top navigation bar.  Select Persons from the left sidebar, then enter the name of the Person to be suppressed in the Search bar and click on the Search button.   

• Select the Person from the search results.  This will bring you to the complete profile page in a new window.  Go to Edit then Metadata and scroll down to the Visibility area, which is located at the bottom of the profile metadata view.
• Select Backend – Restrict to Scholars Portal users to suppress the profile, then hit Save. 
• Once these steps have been completed, the profile information is now suppressed and will no longer be visible on the Scholars Portal public site.  You will still be able to search within the Scholars admin portal to retrieve and reactivate the profile by selecting the Public – no restriction option in the profile Metadata / Visibility area if needed.

Suppressing a researcher profile who is no longer affiliated with Mount Sinai

When a researcher has left Mount Sinai and is no longer affiliated with the institution, in addition to suppressing the profile, the editor will also need to add an "end date" for all the organizational affiliations on the profile. 

• On the Organizational Affiliations section of the profile, click on edit to change the dates of affiliation
• Add an end date using the day/month/year format 
• Click on Save at the bottom of the profile 

As of July 1st, 2022, all pre-existing profiles from the former PlumX platform have been migrated to the ISMMS Scholars portal. All former PlumX profile records will now be managed in the Scholars Admin Portal (backend).

To locate a profile record within the Scholars administrator view, log in to the Scholars Admin Portal (backend) by clicking the login button below or entering the following URL in your browser: https://scholars.mssm.edu/admin.  [Note: single sign-on has been enabled for this login.  Please use your Mount Sinai email and network password as the login credentials for the admin portal]. 

Use the Search option, which is noted by a magnifying glass, on the top navigation bar of the Scholars admin portal. See below for more details.

If your search for an existing researcher returns no results, you will need to create a new profile. Instructions for creating a profile are found below.

• To begin, log in to the Scholars admin portal (backend): https://scholars.mssm.edu/admin
• Select the Master Data tab from the top navigation bar
• Select Persons from the left sidebar. You can trigger the Add Persons workflow by selecting the plus sign (+) beside Persons in the left-hand toolbar

• Once the plus sign (+) is selected, a new window will open where you will be able to enter the Metadata and Personal Identification (biographical) information for the Persons profile.

• When building your profile, it is important to remember that the more relevant data you provide, and the more robust your record is, the better you appear on the portal.
• Key elements which are often used to create an enhanced profile are:
  • Research interests 
  • Biography 
  • Profile photo* 
  • Keywords relevant to your current research / specialty 
  • Some IDs such as ORCID help you to retrieve content not available in Scopus 
  • Activities or Prizes, in addition to Research Output can also improve your Fingerprint and relevancy in search results 

*Please note: the maximum image file size allowed for Photos is 1MB. Accepted file types are .jpg, .png, .jpeg, .bmp, .gif. 

• You may also enable automated searching in Scopus by going to the Edit area of the Person’s profile page and selecting Automated search.

• Once all biographical information has been entered, click Save to save the profile.  Repeat these steps for all new profiles to be created. 

Future instructions on enhancing a profile beyond the required fields will be made available on a forthcoming article on this Scholars portal guide. New enhancements to Scholars Editor workflows are planned for the Scholars admin portal in future iterations of this platform.

Adding Basic Metrics Sources (Scopus and ORCID)

If a researcher has provided their Scopus ID, you will first need to search for their profile in the Scholars admin portal.  Once the profile is found and selected, the personal profile window will appear, and will automatically default to profile metadata view.  You will then be able to select the Scopus ID type to add the unique identifier from Scopus in this view.

The process is the same with an ORCID, where the ORCID ID information can be inputted into the specified Personal Identification - Metadata information field. Each of these metrics sources will dynamically feed into a Scholars Profile and update automatically.

If a researcher does not know their Scopus ID, you can perform an author search in Scopus.

Be sure to login with the link above or with the link on the library’s home page. Toggle from the Documents search to the Author search, insert the researcher’s last name and first name and click search. 

• Locate their Scopus profile from the search results list. This is usually easy for researchers with unique names. For researchers with common names, it can be more difficult. Here are some tips:
  • The profile may still be affiliated with their previous institution. For example is a faculty member is joining us from NYU, select the Scopus profile for that researcher affiliated with NYU.
  • Select the profile with the correct middle initials if known.
  • Use the “View last title” option underneath each result and see if the title of their research paper makes sense in context of the department.
  • Ask the faculty member to help you identify the correct profile.
• Collect the following information from the Scopus profile and paste it into the appropriate field in their Scholars profile.
  • Copy the Author ID field from the Scopus profile and paste it into the Scopus Author ID field on the edit metadata field of the Scholars researcher profile page. The Scopus Author ID field can be found on the right hand side approximately two-thirds of the way down the page in the Claim Research Output By Identifier section.
  • A note on h-index metrics in Scholars. While previously the h-index had to be periodically checked and manually updated in PlumX, Scholars dynamically updates the H-index as it changes. While you may want to periodically monitor profiles for indexing errors, the process is now automated.