Since we reported the release of Author Profiles in the September 2012 issue of this Newsletter, the Scholarly Publication Database (http://spfind.ust.hk) has gone through further expansion.  More than 2,500 publication records and 40 profiles were added in the past six months, bringing the Database to about 50,000 publications in 500 faculty profiles.  This was the result of the hard work of our part-time student helpers, plus the availability of in-house developed automation tools for data importing and profiling.

 

The usage of the Database showed a strong increase exposing the content to Google and other Internet search engines in the summer of 2012.  Over 120,000 page visits were recorded in the past six months.  This was three times higher than the previous six months combined, and 54% of these visits were from computers outside of the campus.  The Library is very pleased with these figures, which demonstrate that this joint project with VPRGO is indeed a very good start to improving the visibility of faculty members' publications and research profiles.

 

The Database will attract even more usage in coming months as it is used to feed faculty members' publication data to the Research Output Submission System (ROSS) for the 2014 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).  Library staff are also helping with RAE submission preparation, including research output data verification, electronic documents delivery and copyright clearance.  We will also maintain a Document Repository so that RAE reviewers will be able to access HKUST's research outputs seamlessly and robustly via UGC's central interface.