Systems and Tools
Find the important tools, systems and databases that are used to conduct, report and manage research activities at UTS.
Manage your research
At UTS, these systems are used for data management of funding applications, ethics approvals, research outputs, research profiles, data storage and more.
- At UTS, ResearchMaster is our system for managing funding applications, ethics approvals, costings and research agreements. Use this tool for all your research project planning and management as well as any HDR candidature management that you undertake.
- Symplectic Elements is your tool for managing your research outputs and profile. It reduces the administrative burden of research while enabling you to access powerful insights. The tool harvests publication data from sources such as Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, RePEc, and SSRN and is used to upload content to OPUS. It also displays outputs on the UTS website and populates research outputs data for My Researcher Dashboard. As a researcher, your Symplectic Elements account is automatically setup when you join UTS. Professional staff need to actively create a profile.
- Stash is the data management platform you use to plan, archive and publish UTS research projects. It helps you manage your research data throughout the life of your project and lets you store associated ethics permissions and data licences to ensure that all the important information about your research data is kept in one place. Stash also allows you to request a research workspace, including storage, from eResearch, and ensures that your Research Data Management Plan complies with relevant research data management guidance.
- A useful tool for group leaders to oversee team research activities, Lab Archives eNotebooks are an electronic version of the traditional paper research notebook. They can be used in the lab as a formal lab notebook, for field work, or simply for keeping track of research. eNotebooks manage IP securely with version tracking and signing and are increasingly replacing hardcopy lab and field notebooks. Any changes and edits are clearly recorded and images and raw data files can be organised into folders. You can share your eNotebook securely with anyone as a secure, portable, and archivable record of research activities.
Discover and be discovered
These online tools will assist you in identifying collaboration opportunities.
- As a UTS staff member your Discovery Profile allows internal and external audiences to search you by name, keywords or disciplines. Using data populated from Symplectic Elements, Discovery Profiles make it quick and easy to have an up-to-date public profile that showcases the breadth of your expertise. Professional staff are encouraged to also create a Discovery Profile.
- A Power BI tool for researcher career development, Collaborator Finder enables you to identify collaboration opportunities and find collaborators based on project and publication details. It helps you discover potential co-investigators for funding based on income categories and search for potential co-authors based on publication data.
Find funding
These online tools help you find relevant funding opportunities from a range of sources including international, national and internal schemes.
- Research Professional provides a comprehensive funding opportunities database that enables researchers to search for funding in all disciplines from a wide range of sponsors across Australia and overseas. While UTS maintains membership to this externally provided database, we will soon be moving to Pivot-RP to offer more features.
- Pivot-RP is a searchable database of research funding opportunities and collaborators across all disciplines and project types. The platform offers search functions to connect you to relevant research funding and collaboration opportunities based on your research profile. It also enables you to gain deep insights and access to real-time national and global funding opportunities.
Assess your Future Fellowship readiness
- The Future Fellowship Benchmarking Tool allows you to compare your performance with Future Fellows in your own discipline since 2017. You can drill down into the Fellow’s individual bibliometrics and ARC grant history and explore overall statistics for this cohort. By tracking some of your current metrics against past successful ARC Future Fellows within the same Field of Research (FoR) code and academic level (FT Level), this tool can help you make informed career decisions over the longer term.
Gain research insights
These online databases and tools allow researchers to gain insights into their collaborative activity, research outputs, analytics and intelligence and research performance.
- A Power BI Dashboard, Researcher Insights displays current and historical research activity of up to 5 years. The dashboard provides easy, transparent and up to date access to your personal research data, including that held in several of the university’s databases such as HDR student enrolment, progression and completions data as well as any research income including grants and donations.
- A Power BI Dashboard, Group Research Insights provides an easy way for research group leaders to track collaborative research activity, research outputs, income and HDR data. The tool provides information about both publications and non-traditional research outputs and tracks HDR load and completions so that research managers can see information aggregated across their group as well as the information of the individuals they manage. The dashboard provides easy, transparent and up to date access to research data held in several of the university’s databases. Access must be requested via Service Connect. You will need an email from your supervisor confirming the level of access requested.
- Dimensions is a linked research knowledge system that brings together grants, publications, citations, alternative metrics, clinical trials, patents and policy documents to deliver a platform that enables you to find insights to inform future strategy. The platform offers access to the world’s largest linked research database, covering publications, grants, patents, clinical trials, datasets, policy documents and technical reports.
- Altmetric presents metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics such as peer reviews, citations on Wikipedia and public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage, bookmarks on reference managers like Mendeley and mentions in social networks. Altmetric charts how often journal articles and other scholarly outputs like datasets are discussed and used around the world, measuring reach beyond academia.
Browse research databases
These online databases allow for location of multi-disciplinary, peer reviewed literature and associated citation data.
- Overton is the world’s largest collection of policy documents, parliamentary transcripts, government guidance and think tank research. It collects data globally from over 180 countries and in many different languages. Overton indexes documents to make them searchable and maps the connections between them, scholarly research and the news media, giving insight into the evidence and influences that are shaping the world around us.
- A database for locating multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed literature and associated citation data, Web of Science Core Collection contains records of articles from the highest impact journals worldwide—including open access journals— conference proceedings and books. It allows you to explore the deep citation connections in the sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities, with a curated collection of more than 21,000 peer-reviewed, high-quality scholarly journals published worldwide.
- Open Publications of UTS Scholars (OPUS) is the UTS open access digital repository, which showcases UTS research excellence to a world-wide audience. OPUS collects, preserves, indexes, and disseminates the research outputs of UTS staff and postgraduate students, providing free global access to the full text of works where possible. Since 2014, the UTS Open Access Policy requires UTS researchers to add their research publications to OPUS to facilitate public access to the University’s research.
- An Elsevier database for locating multi-disciplinary peer-reviewed literature and associated citation data, Scopus uniquely combines a comprehensive abstract and citation database with enriched data and linked scholarly literature. You can quickly find relevant and authoritative research, identify experts and access reliable data, metrics and analytical tools. Using precise search and analytical tools, Scopus provides you with the insights to drive better decisions, actions, and outcomes.
Gain data insights
These online tools allow you to visualise your research data and gain insights from key statistics and analysis.
- Cognos integrates reporting, modelling, analysis, dashboards, stories and event management to visualise and gain insights from research information. The tool performs data aggregation and creates user-friendly detailed reports, offering an option to export reports in XML or PDF format and view the reports in XML format.
- IBISWorld Company Reports analyse the largest Australian companies, listed & non-listed, public, private, foreign owned, trusts and government businesses. IBISWorld Industry Research and Risk Ratings Reports provide key statistics and analysis on Australian, US and global market characteristics, operating conditions, current and forecast performance, major industry participants and more.
Survey research participants
These online tools allow you to collect and analyse data from survey participants.
- Qualtrics is a survey tool used in research, evaluations and other data collection activities. It is the primary UTS Survey Platform and provides a clean web interface for creating surveys, as well as data analysis and distribution management option.
