A researcher may have a primary, home location, e.g., UCSF Profiles, where they've taken care to make sure their profile is accurate and complete.  The researcher may also have a secondary profile at another institution, at an independent research lab, at a hospital.  Duplicating and keeping an extensive profile containing many publications, grants, patents, etc. would be tedious -- in fact, so tedious that few people would devote the effort.

What if there were a gadget that could be dropped onto the user's profile page that examined a primary and secondary profile and noted the differences (for a visual, think WinDiff or a source code merge tool).  When clicked, the gadget could do a merge or "harmonize" the two profiles, note the desired changes, and allow the user to approve.  For an empty secondary profile this would essentially be a copy operation, with the exception of links or reference types that may not be supported in common among two systems.  Afterwards, this Harmonize Gadget would be used to keep profiles aligned with the fewest number of clicks.

An initial test case could be developed between Profiles, VIVO, and KNODE. KNODE discovers researcher content differently than either VIVO or Profiles.  A researcher could claim their KNODE profile, then use the Harmonize Gadget to merge and align the machine generated profile in KNODE with the curated version in Profiles or VIVO.  Or a claimed KNODE profile could be used via this gadget to populate a VIVO profile.

This would be based on VIVO RDF retrieved from both systems via the gadget.  RDF would make the comparison of content much easier.  The merge and update back to each system is probably the biggest, new technical challenge. 

Give profiled researchers a list, in order of recency, of citations to their publications as listed in their profile. Use Microsoft Academic Research's API to do so.

At present, the only way to know this information is to sign up using Scopus or Web of Knowledge. Google Scholar also has a tool but their author disambiguation is relatively weak.

If indeed you can get the names of the publications from Microsoft Academic, this has upsides for both system administrators and profiled researchers. Profiled researchers learn about who is discussing their work. System administrators, and the university in general, have a carrot to encourage researchers to keep their publications accurate and up to date.

One way to further engage the profilees and encourage their media (online and traditional) interaction: Might we add links to media "mention mappers", which quantify social (and other) media appearances, similar to how Q Scores rate familiarity levels of brands, companies and individuals? A good prototype is the Klout influence scoring model. In this way, we could reward profilees for their high "influence" scores in external, non-UCSF media. We could also consider, in developing each profilee's rating, whether or not s/he has added his/her UCSF Profile to his/her LinkedIn or Facebook profile.

Examples: SocialMention.com, Klout.com, BeEvolve.com, NCRR site listing media mentions

In this way, we could imitate those user-oriented and crowdsourcing "help" forums like MS Developers' Network/MSDN, etc.). These sites reward members for frequency (or helpfulness) of responses by providing "points", "stars" or other indices. It would also advertise, to profilees, the benefits of profile maintenance and frequent external media appearances. This would be a minimally labor-intensive way to transfer to profilees partial ownership of the task of promoting their own profiles. By encouraging a larger media presence, we would also broaden outreach for the UCSF Profiles in general.

The automated CTSI data feed (and the UCSF Profiles mini-search feed) are very useful but not necessarily well-known features. The first feature auto-feeds live data from Pubmed publication lists and other UCSF resources into pages hosted on departmental or other UCSF websites. The second links from UCSF pages into UCSF Profiles. 

If we haven't already, might we ask UCSF IT leadership to broadcast these free services to a website managers' listserv or other target group? A "top-down" message from leadership to the IT community might help encourage broader use of this free service, with no financial outlay. Katja Reuters has already been very effective and proactive about promoting this feature:

From John Maa's Gen'l Surgery Dept. page: “View All Publications at UCSF Profiles (Powered by CTSI)” - the embedded link towards the middle of the page is a great example of use of, and credit to, the data feed

From UCSF’s Center for AIDS Research (CFAR)

From UCSF’s San Francisco General Hospital

This would add visibility both to profilees and to the CTSI's great resources for investigators. This visibility among both parties would hopefully facilitate further collaboration across the organization.

The current Profiles system only allows adding links (URLs) from citations entered manually, not through the automated PubMed feature.  Allowing faculty to add multiple links to each publication would be useful.  It would be even more useful to add tools to add links to open access and secure data sharing repositories.  In particular, these should link to open access repositories and supplementary materials or resources.  UCSF and other institutions have open access publication policies in which faculty are now required to give publishers limited licenses to their work instead of unlimited copyright. Data sharing requirements also exist for federally funded studies; links to secure data repositories or documents describing how to access the data would be helpful.  Some projects develop software programs, questionnaire instruments, training manuals, or other important research resources which journals may not publish due to space considerations or may not provide information or links to more details.

In addition, the PubMed citation list in Profiles should pull and display the PubMedCentral identification numbers (PMCIDs) that are assigned when the publication is deposited into the National Institutes of Health Manuscript System (NIHMS) open access repository, as required by federal law for federally supported research.   Having this information in Profiles would be very helpful for preparing biosketches for NIH Progress Reports and new grant applications.

I think it'd be useful to add a widget for faculty and staff to share Twitter feeds through Profiles, especially folks who maintain and manage social media across the University.  Perhaps even a way to pull the information at UCSF centrally, a sort of Twitter hub using Profiles as the primary source of data.  

I know this functionality already exists to some extent on various sites, but similar to the "co-authors" and "same department" tabs that come up on the right, this could be a way of further integrating concordant research and researchers, perhaps even agregating similar research topics.  For instance, if a researcher chose a certain amount of hashtags to follow, this widget could pull together similar voices at UCSF who are working on the same topic.  

It has a clear external value for those trying to navigate the (daunting) institution from Profiles, but also of value to the UCSF faculty or staff as a method of networking.

Feature: Add fields similar to Honors and Awards, but for Education and Training.  Listing the following by dates:

Education and Training
Medical School
Internship
Residency
Medical License
Certificate

Impact:  Shares education, training, degrees, experience with similar background.

Problem. Researchers spend a lot of time reading articles, but it's increasingly difficult to keep up with the explosion of information (volume, velocity, variety). Pubmed and other tools exist for culling articles relevant to our interests, but might generate more results than one has time to read. Often, while reading an article, one might wish to discuss part of it with a colleague or forward it for some interesting detail. However, an emailed pdf or link to an article leaves a recipient with a large amount of matter to read and to further cross-reference with the sender's comments.

Suggested Feature, Utility. If highlighting, comments and annotations can be overlaid on, or linked to specific parts of, an internet full-text article- and viewed openly (or by a chosen audience)- that will make it easier and more time-efficient for scientists to share. discover and discuss new information. It will also enable transparent critique of information. Possibly, this system could be used to save the article as a complex of "original article"+Extras/Comments, or print to a pdf file or appropriate digital format. Lastly, scientists will have the option of sharing articles of mutual interest, complete with Comments to their social networks. Or, even solicit comments by linking to the articles from their Profile pages. "Social commenting" can also include "Like" or "Not Like" etc buttons to rate the +Extras/Comments appended to an article.

Potential issues. Institutional library subscriptions often dictate whether scientists at any given institution may or may not access the full-text of an article. This idea may initially be implemented on open-access articles, eg. freely accessible via Pubmed.

Abstracts are often always accessible to all, and many institutions share materials via interlibrary loan. So, possibly, the +Extras/Comments electronic versions of articles, or printable files, can still be shared.

1. Extra Titles
Proposal: Added Extra Titles field may be useful for researcher who have multiple titles, and/or do research in multi-displinary fields. Example: Extra titles may include Vice-chair of a committee, PI of labs, Faculty of multiple department.

2. Research Interests
Proposal: Add a field for Research Interests. This will help in stating clearly the area of research expertise.

3. Expertise/Specialty
Proposal: Add Expertise/Specialty field

4. Narrative links capabilities
Proposal: Allow links in the body of Narrative

The main idea behind the Citation Integration Widget would be to integrate and organize access to citations from publications of VIVO users. The word widget is a bit of an understatement in the amount of work that would be required to program such a large scale platform, but it would consist of the following:

A citation template would be used, which fills out the information of a citation form a VIVO user, and leaves the rest to the widget (current date, date accessed, page # and sentence) 

VIVO users who have linked publications would set up a quick citation template.

VIVO users who link or upload future publications would have to do a quick citation template as a requirement.

A VIVO user who wants to use the intelligent or literal content of the publication can do so quickly and seamlessly by the use of hashtags (#) or the use of another integrated function. The system would pull the template automatically and perform the in text citation while also filling in the "resources" section. 

The in text citations, as well as the resources, would be live links to the VIVO user's publication - to the exact line even.

The long term objective would be to effectively organize citation information and seek to improve the tedious, traditional, manual method of citation today. This could be spread across many platforms, and its impact would be vast since it is another massive improvement in the quality of how scientific knowledge is shared and used.