Using Your Flight Tracker Profile on the Scholar Portal

Flight Tracker is an application that tracks the career development of researchers. Scholars can be organized into several REDCap projects, each geared towards its own group of administrators. It downloads grants and publications from every available source and has REDCap instruments to collect other data about career development.

Besides administrators, these data are also of interest to individual scholars. For privacy reasons, however, it doesn’t make sense to give scholars access to everyone’s data. Yet scholars still understandably want to see their information to, say, apply for a new job or a promotion. They also might find the data helpful to strategically plan their own career.

Flight Tracker’s Scholar Portal fills in this gap. Once a user logs into REDCap via one special link, they can see all Flight Tracker projects that have a scholar with their name. This special interface won’t grant them general access to the entire REDCap project – just to their own information.

The Scholar Portal contains menus with pages in these areas:

• Your information,
• Your graphs,
• And your network.

Each menu will be discussed in turn to give you an idea about what’s available.

Starting Out

To access the Flight Tracker Scholar Portal, you must first get a link from a Flight Tracker administrator. Further, someone must have added you to a Flight Tracker project for data to exist. Finally, you must still be able to login to your REDCap server. If you have those three items in place, you’re able to get off the ground.

When you follow the entry link and log into REDCap, you’ll be presented with a list of projects that you’re in. Flight Tracker attempts to match your name in REDCap with all Flight Tracker projects. If you are in one project, it’s automatically selected, but if you’re in more than one, you must select which project’s data to use. Each project maintains its own information, and although some coordination is supported, the software makes no attempt to reconcile the data.

You might have realized that name-matching can produce inaccuracies, especially if you have a common name. More than one person with your name might exist at your institution. This situation is nicknamed the “doppelgänger problem.” If you are linked to the wrong name, you can click the “remove” link on the project at the bottom of the page. This approach risks some imprecision, but it also allows you to correct your incorrect information.

When you enter a project by selecting it, the software will present you with three menus, labelled Your Info, Your Graphs, and Your Network. The contents of each one are discussed in turn.

Bibliometrics: The Relative Citation Ratio

You will note that Flight Tracker prefers to use the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) as its bibliometric of choice. The RCR is freely available for any paper in PubMed via an online tool called iCite from the NIH. RCRs are statistically normalized according to the average number of papers in a given field. Therefore, for example, a genetics paper can be easily compared to a pulmonology paper even though citation practices vary between the two fields. An RCR of 1.0 means that the paper is cited as much as the average paper in its field. An RCR of 2.0 means that the paper is cited twice as much as the average paper in its field. An RCR of 0.5 means the paper is cited half as much as the average paper in its field. The NIH reports that RCRs tend to stabilize after 12 months in contrast to the H index which tends to go up over time for established scholars regardless of productivity.

Your Information

The Your Info menu contains ways to interact with your data points directly. It will adjust any of your changes in the appropriate REDCap forms for your project so that your Flight Tracker administrator will be able to see them. Be aware that any REDCap surveys you enter in one project can be automatically shared to other projects so long as they have a place to store it. You don’t need to reenter your data into more than one project!

• The “View Profile” page shows demographic information along with information about your scholarly products, like the number of confirmed publications, average bibliometric scores, and K-to-R conversion status.
• The “Update Surveys / Demographics” page provides a way for you to enter any surveys for your project. Two surveys are especially important: The Initial Survey and the Follow Up Survey. The page has text to describe them. The Initial Survey is Flight Tracker’s main source of demographic information, so it’s especially important. Click an orange button to get started.
• The “Validate Your Publications” page will allow you to see what publications Flight Tracker has for you from PubMed or ERIC. Because of the inaccuracies of name matching, Flight Tracker requires publications be validated before being used in analyses. Your Flight Tracker administrator might have already validated publications for you. These publications were matched by your name and by your institutions’ names. They might contain some missing pieces, so you are encouraged to look at them closely. Your Flight Tracker administrator will appreciate when your data is more accurate.
• Papers downloaded from your ORCID identifier are automatically approved.
• Only papers indexed in PubMed or ERIC are supported. Other papers can be recorded via the “Add Honors & Awards” page, but will not show up in analyses of publications.
• If you have PubMed papers to add, you can add them via the button labelled “Lookup from PubMed Manually.”
• PubMed’s data quality increased significantly for institutional data after January 1, 2014. Because Flight Tracker matches using the institution, you might need to add papers from before this date.
• If you find a publication that was incorrectly validated with a grey checkbox, you can click the “reset” button in the lower-right corner beneath the publication.
• The “Original Research” designation comes automatically from iCite’s data, not from Flight Tracker. They do not promise perfect accuracy in this finding.
• Don’t forget to click the green button labelled “Save Validations” at the top or bottom of the yellow box if you make any changes!
• The “Add Honors & Awards” page lists any awards, presentations, unindexed papers, and committee positions that you have provided or that your administrator has entered.
• If available, the “Using Resources” page will link you to a website where your institution lists career development resources to aid your professional journey.
• The “Edit Your Photo” page allows you to supply a photo for you to use in the Scholar Portal and for your administrator to identify who you are.
• The “View Your ORCID Identifiers” page displays any ORCID identifiers associated with your record. You are strongly encouraged to ensure that ORCID information is correct, including clicking the “This is not me” link for incorrect ORCIDs. Flight Tracker uses ORCID identifiers to automatically validate your publications without manual approval. Flight Tracker is a strong supporter of ORCID identifiers since these effectively solve the “doppelgänger problem” referenced earlier. When used widely enough, ORCIDs promise to automatically identify the right scholar without human effort.

Your Graphs

• The “Publishing Collaborations” page shows a chord diagram of people you have co-authored papers with who are in your Flight Tracker project. Each node on the outside is a scholar, and the node’s size correlates with the number of co-authored papers they have published with you. Each line between nodes indicates one-or-more papers published.
• The “Publishing Impact” page shows a histogram of the RCR of your papers. (The RCR was previously described.) It also shows a line graph of the RCR of your papers as it changes over the years.
• The “Publishing Research Timelines” page shows the MeSH terms of topics that your papers have used over the years. You can sort the graphs by the earliest publication date or by count (that is, the number of publications for a topic). Each green line shows the course of your entire publication profile. Each blue bar indicates the time period when you have published on a given topic. Each black line indicates one-or-more papers published at a given time. Clicking on a black line will highlight that paper over time. Hovering your mouse over a black line will display a tooltip with the PubMed IDs of the paper or papers referenced.
• The “Grant & Publication Timelines” page shows timelines of your history producing the scholarly products of grants and publications. Blue bars indicate grant awards that are active over the timespan. If a grant’s end date is unknown, then the award is represented by a dot on the bottom line. The award number is within the bar. Each blue dot indicates a publication, and the journal’s abbreviated name sits to the left of the blue dot. Clicking on the journal name will take you to the PubMed abstract of the paper.
• As described in the title, the “Publication Collaborations in Project (Computationally Expensive)” page may take some time to load due to large amounts of data. It shows a chord diagram of all the co-authorship collaborations in your entire group. A node on the circle is a scholar in your Flight Tracker project. A line between two scholars indicates a co-authored publication. A busy graph indicates a lot of collaboration. Hovering your mouse over a node will highlight that scholar’s collaborations with their co-authors.
• The “Grant Funding by Year” page shows the funding that this Flight Tracker project has for your grants year by year, over your awards’ timespan. Note that this funding might be inaccurate due to missing or partially complete data.

Your Network

• The “Mentoring Portal” page shows information related to you and your mentor(s). First, your administrator needs to have entered your mentor(s) into your REDCap record. If available, the page shows who those mentors are and any papers you have co-authored with them. It will also display a link where you can access a customizable mentee-mentor agreement to converse with your mentor(s).
• The “Find a Collaborator” page facilitates you searching through all the Flight Trackers active on your server to access papers and potential collaborators on a given topic. This page is currently under a significant revision and will be described much more when complete.
• The “Bulletin Board” allows you to post messages with other users of Flight Tracker’s Scholar Portal.