Rush Profiles (also known as Profiles Research Networking Software, or Profiles RNS) is an open-source researcher networking and expertise discovery tool developed by Harvard University. The Rush Research Applications team developed a customized version of this software to populate data from Rush University’s Faculty Management System.
It is a web-based system that builds detailed researcher profiles and maps relationships between people, research topics, and institutions – helping users discover expertise, foster collaboration, and visualize networks of research activity.
How does Profiles work?
Rush uses Profiles to make their researchers’ work more visible and to promote internal and external collaborations. Profiles RNS provides much more useful information than typical directory listings or ordinary literature searches. Algorithms analyze publication data to define a researcher's professional interests with a set of prioritized keywords.
The factors used to rank and weight the significance of a specific keyword as a useful descriptor of a researcher include:
- The researcher's position in the author list of a publication
- The importance of a keyword as a publication topic
- The date of a specific publication
- The overall commonness of a keyword in the literature
- The impact of a publication using citation information
How do I update my Rush Research profile?
Rush researchers (or their proxies) can add any missing publications by doing a PubMed search from within Profiles RNS or manually entering publications that do not exist in PubMed. The Disambiguation Engine learns from these changes to improve the results of the next literature analysis and update.
Requests for evaluating or implementing new research software can be submitted through the Generic Service Request - Rush ESC. Under "Category," please select "University - Research"