Scholars Portal: Announcements & Updates

August 24, 2023 - Twitter Metrics No Longer Available in Scholars Portal

Elsevier has notified us that due to increased costs in accessing X (formerly known as Twitter) data, tweets will no longer form a part of the Social Media category of metrics in the Plum print of Scholars Portal. Additionally, tweet and retweet details will no longer be available through other Elsevier products such as Scopus.

These changes are likely to occur on or around August 31st, 2023.

As a result, you are likely to see declines in the values displayed in the Plum print Social Media category metric for items in your Publications & Research Output on both your Profile User Overview screen and on your Publications & Research Output page.

If you would like to understand what else is included in the social media metrics category, please refer to the vendor website: https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about-metrics/social-media-metrics/. 

If you would like to learn more about metric types available within the Scholars Portal, please refer to the Levy Library Scholars Portal Guide: https://libguides.mssm.edu/scholarsportal/metrics  

If you have questions, please contact the Levy Library Scholars Portal support team at scholars@mssm.edu.  

May 12, 2023 - ISMMS Scholars Portal Grants Information Temporarily Removed from Display

Promoting Mount Sinai’s amazing research and discovery is a shared priority and critical in support of our School’s mission. In August 2022, we announced the launch of the ISMMS Scholars Portal (scholars.mssm.edu), a publicly available web portal deployed to highlight individual researchers and groups such as departments, institutes and centers.  This same platform is used at other biomedical research institutions such as NYU and Mayo Clinic. 

The ISMMS Scholars Portal includes federal research grants and projects for each researcher by using the vendor’s proprietary system to match investigator name to our research profile names.  In some cases, this has worked well, populating researcher profiles with grant information linked to NIH Reporter.  In other cases, the matching has been incorrect and has required staff to correct the linkages. 

Recently, Mount Sinai faculty have expressed concerns about the errors in matching and grant data quality and timeliness. In addressing these concerns with the vendor, we have explored a variety of options, however, without the consistent use of a unique researcher identifier like ORCID, it is not possible to guarantee accurate matching.  There are not sufficient resources to manually monitor and update vendor-supplied grant data on the faculty profiles on an ongoing basis.   

After discussion with our Scholars Portal Advisory Group and analysis of several faculty members’ data, we have decided, as a temporary measure, to cease displaying Grant & Project information on the Scholars Portal site (scholars.mssm.edu) while developing a mechanism to incorporate our own Mount Sinai data from the systems managed by the Grants & Contracts Office.   Once we have developed a sustainable process to ingest and display this data on a timely basis, we will work with selected faculty to test that it is working acceptably before restoring the display of grants information.   

We will communicate our progress on this effort through direct emails like these to the Faculty and also through Departmental channels to reach other members of research teams who may have been using or featured in the portal.   

If you had been linking to the Grants & Projects section of your research profile, we suggest these three alternatives:

1. Link to an NIH Reporter search of your grants
2. Make your SciENcv biosketch link public with its grants/other support information, or
3. Link to your ORCID profile if you are maintaining the Funding section. 

If you have questions about any of these methods or would like to express questions or concerns to the Advisory Group, please contact the Levy Library at scholars@mssm.edu.  Thank you very much for partnering with the ISMMS Levy Library to promote your research and scholarship. 

Updated May 12th, 2023