What is USC Health Sciences Profiles?
USC Health Sciences Profiles is a powerful online tool that makes it easy to find USC experts and research in the health sciences. It currently represents more than 2,500 faculty.

Designed to promote interdisciplinary research and collaboration, USC Health Sciences Profiles provides a quick search to discover people, research expertise, and networks of co-authors and related authors who have published on similar research topics

A new, significantly improved version was launched in April 2014. In the first eight weeks since launch, the site has already been visited by users from over 200 universities and colleges with nearly 20,000 pageviews. 1,714 researchers' profiles have been viewed, 127 of them ten or more times.

It’s automated daily
USC Health Sciences Profiles automatically generates profile pages for new USC faculty and displays their PubMed publications.

While the data are updated automatically, users can customize their own profile by adding a research description, web links, videos, social media activity, and more.

Watch this demonstration by Thomas Buchanan, MD, Vice Dean for Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC

Strengthening the USC research brand and boosting researchers’ online presence
The tool is search engine optimized: Specially enhanced profiles are viewed more often and increase the chances of USC experts being found on search engines such as Google or Bing.

What are the data sources?
All data displayed on the profile pages are currently available on other public websites.
Data sources include: USC GDS/HR system, which also feeds the central USC Directory, and PubMed. Updates occur daily and weekly, respectively.

Who can edit the profiles?
The profile owner or a designated proxy can edit and enhance a page with personalized data including an overview, related websites, faculty mentoring, featured publications, news articles, videos and presentations, a Twitter feed, and more.

Traffic for the site continues to increase steadily, and users are letting us know that they're finding USC Profiles useful.

Perspectives on USC Health Sciences Profiles

Looking ahead
USC Profiles is continuing to evolve as a powerful research networking tool, and as a resource for finding and connecting with experts at USC.

“We look forward to partnering with groups on campus as we continue to enhance USC Profiles’ functionality by adding new features and groups such as postdoctoral scholars, residents, and research staff. Potential new features include the capability to promote clinical studies and trials on a researcher’s profile and add CV documents,” said Katja Reuter, PhD, Director of Digital Strategy and the eHome program at SC CTSI who is leading the strategic development and implementation of the tool.

“We also recognize if we truly want to help advance research across disciplines and institutions, we will need to reach beyond our institutional walls. To achieve this, we're working closely with UCSF and others to enable research networks across institutions,” added Reuter.

The tool was implemented by the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI) in partnership with the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (CTSI at UCSF).

The software, originally developed by Harvard Catalyst and further enhanced by the CTSI at UCSF, is a free, open-source product with extensive search engine optimizations. As it extends from a standalone web application into a software platform, it allows developers to add their own content to Profiles in much the same way that developers write Facebook apps.

SC CTSI is looking forward to hearing from the campus community about suggestions and ideas on how the tool may help the university and the conduct of research. You can contact us on Twitter @USCProfiles or via email: profiles@sc-ctsi.org.

Related Resources

• Digital brochure
• Video introduction
• What is USC Profiles? (PPT slides)
• How to edit your profile? (PPT slides)
• USC Profiles talking points
• @USCProfiles on Twitter