OpenSocial Gadget Contest

Adding new features to Profiles and/or VIVO

"deep text" searchable "Narrative" and "Faculty Mentoring" fields

Proposal Status: 

I have been promoting and using this tool predominately as a mechanism to connect mentees with career mentors within our home department.  Of course those who are interested in serving as career mentors must create specific text in both their "Narrative" and "Faculty Mentoring" fields of their profile.  These paragraphs provide a rich source of information about mentors beyond whatever words appear in their publication titles, keywords, etc.  For example, mentors can elect to disclose things about their personal life (e.g. sexual orientation, whether they have kids, hobbies, work-life balance issues, etc.). 

I would love it if the "search by research topic function" could "deep-text" search from these two fields.  Or perhaps there could be a separate search function if more feasible/viable?

 

It takes a team mentorship approach, so I believe this added functionality would increase the utility of the Profiles tool for mentees seeking adequate mentorship, especially to augment their research mentorship!  

Comments

Hi - thanks for the idea! The good news is that there is some functionality in UCSF Profiles today that might help you immediately, and perhaps can be expanded upon with your idea. Today, in a little known/used feature, there is a "Google-based" full text search of "Narrative" text if you search on by research topic. Here's how to find it: 1. If you submit your search, scroll down to below the search results table of people. 2. There is likely a box below the table of people that says "Full Text Search Results (beta) - Powered by Google" with a small + sign on the right. 3. Click on the + sign to expand the box and see results of a full text search that will (at this time) include search result matches from Narrative text and Titles of articles. If you search for a term that is not a keyword assigned to any articles (for example: "mhealth") -- there may be no people returned, but there will be results in the Full Text Search Results from Narratives. We were testing this feature out for utility, and would love to hear more back from you if you have more comments such as adding the faculty mentoring narrative (and perhaps making it more obvious!) thanks!

Thank you Leslie for teaching me about that existing function. I tried doing the search, but still no luck. I have added the word "pregnancy" to the narrative section of my profile so that we can see if I appear in the full text search results (this word has nothing to do with my professional identity!). No luck. I also have the same word appearing in my "Faculty Mentoring" section as well. I think this search function isn't very intuitive or easy to spot. And indeed I do think adding the faculty mentoring narrative field for deep text searching would be good. If I'm dreaming big, perhaps having a more sophisticated "advanced search" function that would allow complex queries across multiple fields or domains. Say for example, if a junior faculty wanted to find a prospective career mentor in a specific school (e.g. SOM), with a specific career path that included funding from a particular funding agency (e.g. RWJ), and someone who is balancing family obligations at home. This kind of querying would be most effective when the database is large and one needs to thin down the search results (e.g. when searching PubMed there are lots of mechanisms to limit the results). Thanks!

Hi - thanks for trying the search... indeed, it is not easy to find. Because we are testing this out, we limited the "full text" search results to the first 20 records found. I suppose "pregnancy" is fairly common. I did a search for "Rochester" (maybe someone is looking for alumni :) -- and if you do this, at least you can see the functionality and you will be in the search results! Thanks for the idea and the feedback! It's invaluable for us.

As a result of technical feasibility review conducted by the Virtual Home team at CTSI, this proposal was considered beyond the technical scope for implementing it as an OpenSocial gadget. On behalf of Clinical and Translational Science Institute at UCSF, thank you for participating in this contest.

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