Research Intelligence and the VIVO Platform: A Case Study from Texas A&M University and a Proposal for the VIVO Community

Bruce Eric Herbert, Dong Joon Lee, Ethel Mejia

Keywords: VIVO, research intelligence, case study

Abstract:

Texas A&M University Libraries use a second-generation VIVO instance as the central software system of Scholars@TAMU (http://scholars.tamu.edu/), our research information management (RIM) system. Over the last couple of years, we have used campus use cases for the RIM system to drive development of our VIVO instance. One of the use cases with the fastest growth in demand is research intelligence, the characterization of Texas A&M University research and its relationship to funding opportunities, the research of other institutions, and changing societal needs and grand challenges. Characterization of an institution’s research enterprise can support data-driven decision making across an institution, help make strategic decisions on how to allocate resources, and improve the organization’s narrative of the scholarly and societal impact of its research.
The strategy for the technical development of our VIVO instance focused on supporting faculty input to improve data quality, the integration of dis-aggregated and heterogenous data through a customized ontology aligned with institutional mission and context, and a robust application programming interface (API) that directly supports data reuse across the institution. The technical capabilities of Scholars@TAMU, the growing expertise among librarians in the Office of Scholarly Communications, and a new partnership with the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science has allowed us to meet a growing campus demand for research intelligence among faculty, large research collaborations, departments and colleges, and the Office of the Vice President of Research.
With all the success of Scholars@TAMU, we still remain vulnerable at Texas A&M to competition from commercial systems. The primary advantage of the commercial systems is that they allow the characterization of research across institutions. The improving sophistication of the VIVO platform along with the growth in the VIVO/VITRO community indicates that it is time to take advantage of VIVO’s linked data to serve our institutional needs for research intelligence.