Academic Analytics
Through teaching, research, public engagement, service, and a commitment to diversity, equity inclusion, and belonging, faculty at the University of Kansas lift students and society by educating leaders, building healthy communities and making discoveries that change the world.
At KU, there are two sets of tools available to support faculty activity management and strategic planning:
- The Activity Management tools help faculty identify funding opportunities, generate P&T CVs and accreditation reports, and manage, edit and share their research activities with potential collaborators, administrative leaders and the public.
- The Peer Analysis tools provide academic unit leaders with comparative research productivity data based on discipline-specific weighting of activities from the previous fall. VP and dean-level users can view comparative data for all units at KU, while heads of departments can view comparative data for their department only. These analyses are useful for meeting the aims of key central offices, most notably the Office of the Provost, the Office of Research, and the Center for Faculty Development and Mentoring.
These data and analysis tools are available as part of our subscription to Academic Analytics.
The Faculty Insight portal and its public-facing counterpart Experts at KU are augmented with data migrated from KU's previous faculty activity management system known as PRO and data supplied by AIRE.
Activity Management: Faculty portal
Faculty Insight
Faculty Insight lets faculty manage their scholarly activity records pertaining to teaching, research, and service.
Access: KU Faculty
Uses:
* Provides faculty with a central profile of research activities from the Academic Analytics database, augmented by data from AIRE and self-entered data
* Generates faculty Promotion & Tenure CVs supporting P&T processes and annual evaluations, and helps locate potential external reviewers
* Creates various accreditation reports (currently in development)
* Helps faculty identify potential funding opportunities and research collaborators
* Configurable for integration into faculty web profilesExperts at KU
Experts at KU lets you share your research profile to help attract collaborators, funding, and students and to help promote a better understanding of the institution’s research capabilities.
Access: The public
Uses:
* Enables scholars across your discipline to find collaborators for grants and research projects
* Promotes your work to both scholarly and public audiences
* Helps communicators identify research projects to highlight as part of communications strategies
* Helps prospective students identify experts in their field of interest at KU
Peer Analysis: Academic Leadership Access
Benchmarking
Explore KU's scholarly research activity and compare it to customizable peer groups.
Access: Provost, Vice Provosts and Deans have institution-wide access; Heads of Department have access to departmental data
Uses:
* Compares faculty scholarly activity against disciplinary norms, with the option to customize peer groups
* Identifies departmental and institution-wide research strengths and areas to target for growth
* Supports faculty development, facilitating recognition, awards, and opportunities for collaboration, and building of mentoring and support networks
* Supplements program/department review processes with external peer comparisons
* Supports guidance for scholarly activity strategies for unitsAnalysis on Demand
An evolving repository of interactive, custom analyses directly accessible from the Portal. Analyses are developed through partnerships with client stakeholders.
Access: Provost, Vice Provosts and Deans have institution-wide access; Heads of Department have access to departmental data.
Uses:
* Supports award nomination strategies
* Explores the research trajectory of early career faculty and faculty movement across institutional categories
* Identify highly research active faculty
* Explores disciplinary research trend
* Compares faculty demographics at the unit level with peersResearch Insight
Helps administrators identify and bring together subject matter experts by searching beyond department, program, or even institutional boundaries to quickly and easily form strong research teams.
Access: Provost, Vice Provosts and Deans have institution-wide access; Heads of Department have access to departmental data
Uses:
* Identifies experts on specific topics to build collaborative research teams
* Finds suitable honorific awards for KU faculty
* Discovers funding opportunities in particular research areas
FAQs
Academic Analytics compiles data from federal, university, and private sources. Article and Conference Proceeding publication data are obtained directly from publishers, using digital object identifiers (DOI®). Citation data are derived via DOI®-to- DOI® linkages based on the literature cited section of published journal articles and conference proceedings. Book data are collected from the British Library catalog and Baker and Taylor, Inc. Grant data are collected from federal granting agencies and select private sources. Patent data are obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization. Honorific Award information is derived from publicly available information from national governing societies. Performance and Exhibit data can be added directly to Faculty Insight by faculty.
- Publication of scholarly works (e.g., books, journal articles)
- Citations in selected journal articles
- Research funding by federal agencies
- Dollar amount awarded from nationally competitive grants
- Select honorific awards
- Number of journal articles, citations, books, grants by tenure-track faculty members
Academic Analytics calculates the unit level Scholarly Research Index (SRI) based on the mean SRI scores of individual faculty members within the unit. Thus, the SRI of each unit or other level of aggregation – program, department, broad field, institutions, etc.- is the average of the deduplicated faculty who comprise that unit.
Metrics for Faculty-Based Scholarly Research Index (Default Metrics)
Metrics for the person-based Scholarly Research Index are:
- Total Journal Articles
- Total Awards
- Total Books
- Total Book Chapters
- Total Citations
- Total Conference Proceedings
- Total Grants
- Total Grant Dollars
- Total US Patents
- Total Clinical Trials
Academic Analytics utilizes a weighting scheme for these metrics, which varies across taxonomic classifications.
Scholarly Research Index (SRI) Methodology Description
The Scholarly Research Index (SRI) is a methodology to provide comparative context for faculty or unit research activity compared to taxonomy peers. This comparison is based on the metrics Academic Analytics collects and maintains for the peer analysis/benchmarking tools.
Person level SRI is a composite score, based on the metrics weighed in the faculty member's unit taxonomic classification. The composite score is displayed on a Z-Score scale, but it is NOT a composite Z-Score. SRI is derived in this manner because the practice of using Z-Scores to identify possible outliers can be misleading, particularly as it relates to variable or small sample sizes. This methodology ensures the SRI is scaled based on the number of faculty in the taxonomy.
Within each taxonomy, Academic Analytics calculates each faculty member's rank on each of the metrics and multiplies each of those metric ranks based on the respective metric weights. Academic Analytics sums the weighted ranks for each person and calculates the Z-Score of the summed weighted ranks for each faculty member within the taxonomy. That Z-Score is displayed as the SRI score in the peer analysis/benchmarking tools.
Scholarly Research Index (SRI) Calculation Steps
- Rank the total metric counts for each faculty member in the taxonomy
- Calculate the number of faculty in the taxonomy
- Calculate each faculty member's rank within the taxonomy, for each metric
- Multiply each metric rank by the metric weight
- Sum the weighted ranks for each faculty member
- (Total Weighted Rank - Discipline Total Weighted Rank Mean)/Discipline Total Weighted Rank Standard Deviation = Scholarly Research Index (SRI)
The keyword search uses natural language processing techniques and targeted algorithms to compare keyword(s) against profile data and identify relevant scholars and grant opportunities.
Academic Analytics generates a set of key research terms for each scholar by comparing productivity data for a given scholar against all available productivity data. The more times a term appears in a specific scholar’s productivity data, relative to the number of times the term appears in all productivity data in the collection, the more closely associated the term is to the scholar.
Faculty are to be evaluated by the instruments and metrics detailed in unit-level faculty evaluation plans. Faculty Insight can be used to generate reports of activities (CVs) that faculty turn in to their chairs/deans as part of the annual review process.
All tenured/tenure-track faculty in all academic units (including Law and clinical/medical disciplines) and ranked non-tenure-track research faculty. Currently, ranked clinical faculty who have grants are also included.
KU submits a faculty roster each year to include all tenure/tenure-track faculty and non-TT faculty who are expected to produce research as of November 1 of a given academic year. Academic Analytics restricts the benchmarking faculty included on each tab to the following criteria:
Department Faculty
- Faculty included in departments have HR lines or formal/informal courtesy status.
- Faculty can be associated with multiple departments regardless of funding.
- Faculty with the following titles are included:
- Professor, associate professor, assistant professor with or without the research modified title - (assistant/associate) research professor.
- Faculty excluded are: 1) modified clinical title, 2) librarians, 3) lecturers, 4) professors of practice, 5) teaching professors, and 6) law faculty (except if the law faculty are associated with another department).
Program Faculty
- Faculty associated with a PhD research doctoral program (actively mentoring PhD students and sitting on dissertation committees).
- Faculty with chair, co-chair, or member privileges of indicated unit are included. Outside members or Grad Studies Representatives should not be included.
Other information
- Faculty administrators without a tenure home should not be included.
- Faculty on non-sabbatical leave or emeritus professors are not included.
No. Our license to Digital Measures expired on June 30th 2021. All of the data held by Digital Measures was migrated to the Faculty Insight tool, available as part of our subscription to Academic Analytics. The Faculty Insight tool lets faculty manage and add items to their research activities profile and then generate a pre-formatted P&T CV.
Scholar profile keywords are matched to funding opportunity data from a third-party funding database. Grant opportunities are updated daily and contain approximately 40,000 open funding opportunities from over 10,000 public and private entities. Funding opportunities may be filtered by using the filter button on the left-hand side.
Please contact KU Analytics, Institutional Research and Effectiveness at AIRE-Help@ku.edu to ask additional questions.