FAQs: Discovery

For publications, the publication date from the highest precedence record and not reporting date, is displayed in Discovery. Online publication date will be used in the absence of a Publication date.

For Grants, Teaching and Professional activities we display the reporting dates.  In the case of equipment, dates are not shown.  

Approximately 5 minutes.

Note: Occasionally certain Elements processes can mean there is a delay in the Discovery Module data updating. If you have the Discovery Module live and you have any concern about this please contact Support.

Elements and the Discovery Module must be upgraded at the same time. Your Discovery Module will remain live and functional during the upgrade. Once all of the upgrade processes have been completed, changes made in Elements may take longer than usual to propagate to the Discovery Module until synchronisation is complete.

If your organisation is based in the EU, you will need to consider GDPR in relation to your instances of Elements and the Discovery Module. In GDPR terms, your organisation is the "data controller" for the your instances of Elements and the Discovery Module and the "data subjects" are your Elements users. Symplectic is the "data processor."

To help your organisation communicate local privacy statements or policies and any GDPR related content, the ability for you to add a local 'privacy statement' is displayed on the user-facing 'Privacy' page in Elements. If you have any questions around GDPR, please raise a ticket on the support site. More details: Supporting article on Privacy for the HR Feed

System level Data Source precedence is used to determine the record of choice that appears in the Discovery Module. System Administrators can see this here: System Admin > Data Sources > Data Source Management.

This does not affect what is displayed on Discovery. This is a "user only" function and is not used to determine the display of meta data in the Discovery Module.

This depends on your configuration setting for user-defined privacy settings.

If you have enabled user-defined privacy settings:

• Impersonate the user in Elements and go to Profile & work > My Profile and click the Edit mode button.

• Ensure the profile privacy level is set to "Internal".

• Then go to System Admin > Users & Groups > User Management > Manage Users and Feeds, search for the user and go to their details.

• Check that the user's profile privacy setting has not been set to "Public" by the HR feed. If it hasn't, no change is required.

• If it has, change the User import source from "Automated feed" to "Local", update the User privacy level override to "Internal" and save your changes.

• Within 5 minutes the user will no longer be visible on the Discovery Module.

If you have NOT enabled user-defined privacy settings:

• Go to System Admin > Users & Groups > User Management > Manage Users and Feeds, and search for the user and go to their details.

• Change the User import source from "Automated feed" to "Local", update the User privacy level override to "Internal" and save your changes.

• Within 5 minutes the user will no longer be visible on the Discovery Module.

Note: A user who has been set to "Local" will be ignored by the HR feed until they are set back to "Automated". We recommend changing this setting back to Automated, either when the data has been updated and the user is happy to be made Public again, or by changing the HR feed setting at source.

Possible reasons:

• A delegate has claimed the Publication on behalf of the researcher. See History notes for details.

• Automatic claiming using author identifiers is in place. Check by impersonating the user and  Profile & Work > Personal Profile and Identifiers > My Research Identifiers.

To change Publication visibility on the Discovery Module

• On the My Publications page locate the item

• In version 6.1 or earlier, click the Hide icon (shown below) to hide this user's relationship to the Publication.

  

• Click on the Manage privacy settings icon and change the relationship to 'Private.'

• Within 5 minutes the user will no longer be visible on the Discovery Module for this user.

  

Note: This does not remove the Publication from the Discovery Module for co-authors in your institution. A publication that has been claimed by 3 users and hidden by one user will still be shown on the Discovery module for the users that have not hidden it. E.g. Researcher1, Researcher 2 and Researcher 3 have all claimed a single publication. Researcher 1 has used the hide function on the Elements Profile for this Publication. The Discovery Module shows the Publication for Researcher 2 and Researcher 3 but not for Researcher 1.

The Discovery Module utilises labels from the Elements User Profile as search terms. Label schemes offer structured metadata for keyword searching. Not all Elements labels are surfaced in the Discovery Module interface. We recommend you upload a custom label scheme should you require additional labels to describe the work of researchers in specialised disciplines at your institution. Custom label schemes can be limited to specific Groups in Elements or set to appear for all staff. For further information see Managing and creating label schemes. 

You will need a working RT2 Repository Connection in Elements. The item in Elements should be deposited and "Live" If there is no repository record in Elements, the Discovery Module cannot show a "View More Info" link.

Symplectic works with Readcube, (also a Digital Science company) to provide getFTR Full Text for any Open Access content.

The link is shown when all the following conditions are met:

1. View PDF is enabled in the configuration (managed by Symplectic)

2. The record with the highest datasource precedence has a correct DOI. Datasource precedence can be checked in Elements by going to System Admin > Data Sources > Data Source Management and scrolling to the Data Source Precedence Section.

3. The RT2 Harvest Crosswalk contains the DOI in the field mappings.

4. Readcube can identify an Open Access version of the Full Text for display.

Ongoing feeds can be configured to allow users to manage the visibility (show/hide) of the item. This is related to the ongoing feed's configuration key "can-overwrite-existing-link-visibility" set to "false"

Users or System Administrators can add a Preferred name to Elements. 

Custom URLs: For clients who have chosen to provide and manage their own URL's - described in the article Setting up the URLs for the Discovery Module, you will need to update via the HR Feed.

Standard Elements:  the URL will automatically update to use the Preferred Name.

In both cases, users should be reminded to update any links they have added to 3rd party websites that point to their Discovery Module Profile. Search engines can take roughly 6 months to update the new Discovery Module links and users may need to be reminded to clear their cache if they see a previous version of the name appearing. You may optionally choose to access Google's search console to re-submit the new page manually which may speed up indexing on 

A valid public URL path fragment can be empty, or up to 50 characters, starting with a letter and containing only the following characters:

• alphanumeric

• dot

• underscore

• dash 

• apostrophe characters 

• tilde characters.

No other special characters are allowed.

For advocacy processes prior to roll out, you may want to identify each user's Discovery Module URL. 

If you are using a custom URL: 

<Your URL>/<[PublicUrlPathFragment]

e.g. https://discovery-demo.symplectic.co.uk/nick.anderson 

If you are using the Elements standard URL

<Discovery Module URL>/<user ID>-<firstname>-<surname>

https://discovery-demo.symplectic.co.uk/625-nick-anderson 

UI- precedence order- highest first

User defined first name - User defined last name

Known as - Last name

First name - Last name

Note: all names are used by the search function. 

URL- precedence order- highest first

Known as - Last name

First name - Last name

This is something Symplectic can configure for you.

Read this article on User Profile Privacy Settings and then to configure the HR Feed see HR Data Import and Elements User Groups article.

The HR feed will no longer contain the researcher and their status changes to 'not current'. When this occurs, the researcher profile will no longer appear on the Discovery Module.

We realise that the functionality the Discovery API offers offers may be appealing for other usecases, however the Discovery API has not been designed or developed for client use.

The Discovery API has been developed purely to support the Discovery application and as a result, it does not offer any of the functionality necessary for it to be suitable for use by clients, such as backwards compatibility, scalability, and data processing and request logging. Use of the Discovery API for purposes other than to populate the Discovery application is not covered by our SLA, and such uses could be very risky as they could impact Discovery functionality as a whole, compromising performance and uptime for your public profiles.

The Elements API is our general purpose integration interface, and it has been specifically designed and developed for client use. It is carefully developed using versioning to ensure we maintain backwards compatibility, and we offer documentation about best practices for its use.

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