Steps to Get Started

Second, grant your API Token rights for API Import and API Export. These steps can be taken via REDCap’s User Rights page, also linked on the left-hand toolbar. Click on your username and click the button to Edit User Privileges. On the Basic Privileges list on the left, scroll down until you see API Export and API Import/Update. Ensure both these items are checked. If one is unchecked, the software will not allow you to set Flight Tracker up. They need to be checked for every user with an API token.

Finally, ask the REDCap admin team to “enable the Flight Tracker for Scholars External Module on this project.” For almost every institution, this step involves emailing the REDCap admin team with your project’s id number – its “pid” available in red next to the project’s title in REDCap. In your email, supply the pid number. If you encounter difficulties getting your REDCap team to download it, please email flighttracker@vumc.org to engage in further dialogue.

The First Setup Page

After your REDCap admin enables Flight Tracker, it will take over your project, and you’ll see a big Flight Tracker logo atop virtually every screen. The setup process will include three webpages. The first page involves one form at the bottom with a dozen-or-so entities.

The project’s Title will be carried in from whenever you set up your REDCap project. Again, it does not need to include the words “Flight Tracker” because the software will automatically add them. The API token should also be automatically imported.

Because Flight Tracker gets data via name-matching and institution-matching, getting the institution’s name right takes a high priority. Be aware that all these institutions are case-insensitive – that is, upper- and lower-case don’t matter. The software provides three fields to get it right:

• The Full Institution Name will be searched for your home institution for every scholar on the NIH RePORTER, PubMed, and other data sources. You should look at these sources to report your institution’s name verbatim, including punctuation, because sometimes they can do funny things with institutions’ names. For instance, the word “univ” is sometimes substituted for “university,” and when the computer searches for university, it ends up blank. The API will use this entire phrase to match exactly your institution’s name. For Vanderbilt, I usually use “Vanderbilt University Medical Center” for this field.
• The Short Institution Name gives you a backup field to get it right. The same rules apply as with the Full Institution Name. Sometimes the NIH RePORTER, PubMed, and other data sources conflict, and this field gives you yet another chance to match one of these options. For Vanderbilt, I often enter “Vanderbilt” as my backup in case someone lists “Vanderbilt University” as their institution, which would not be matched by the longer name. Notably, our data sources never use abbreviations like VUMC, so they’re essentially useless here.
• Finally, the Other Affiliated Institutions gives you a chance to associate other institutions with this project. For instance, at Vanderbilt, we pursue some partnerships with Meharry Medical College and Tennessee State University in town. Therefore, we sometimes enter “Meharry, Tennessee State” into this field. You can enter more than one institution by entering a comma. This field can also be skipped. The same rules about matching to data sources apply here, too. If you need a third opportunity to add your home institution’s name, you can enter it here.

I consider these three items the “home team” because these institutional names will be searched for every scholar. If you need to change them later, you can, as will be described in the Next Steps section.

Several other fields complete this form:

• The “Home” Institutions that Your Scholars Belong To should contain a list of all the “home team” institutions we set up above, separated by commas. These institutions will be transformed into a dropdown for your scholar to select one if you send out a survey. The survey’s dropdown will also grant an “Other” option. This field exists to give you a way to make a prettier list of institutional names rather than the “hacky” way we did to appease the NIH RePORTER and PubMed above. If we follow our example earlier, I’d use, “Vanderbilt, Meharry, Tennessee State.”
• The Class of Project enables you to identify T or K grants. If a T grant or a K grant is specified, the software will ask your grant name; if those words do not describe your project, just click “Other.” This field impacts the project minorly and should not serve as a source of stress.
• The Special Project Design allows you to configure a Signup project that allows users to sign themselves up for Flight Tracker via a REDCap survey. Very few institutions use this option, and its description is beyond the scope of this presentation. For most of us, leaving it as Normal is sufficient.
• The Class of Server is usually Production, but if you’re using a test server, you should say so.
• The Timezone is prefilled from your server, and usually, it is correct. If it’s not, please correct it.
• The Admin Email(s) will receive a daily email whenever Flight Tracker finishes its overnight processing. More than one email can be provided so long as they’re separated by a comma. Your email address is provided as a default.

When you’re done, click the black Transform My Project! button at the bottom. Don’t worry: You can adjust these values later, as will be described in the Next Steps section, if you did something wrong or need to expand your project’s reach.

The Second Setup Page

The next page contains values that will be used to configure your Data Dictionary, also called Metadata. These values can similarly be changed or reconfigured later.

The list of Academic Departments is used to configure Flight Tracker’s list of departments wherever it appears in REDCap. One department can be listed per line in the textbox. You do not need to provide an exhaustive list of all your institution’s department; you just need to provide those used by your scholars.

The list of Resources configures Flight Tracker to track your scholars’ use of aids that promote their career development. In Flight Tracker lingo, resources aid professional success and consist of workshops or tools. An entire menu and an educational module are devoted towards resource use.

To configure the Data Dictionary correctly, the software requires that both departments and resources have at least one item. But you can “cheat” if you’re willing to live with the consequences. You can enter “Department” in the first textbox if you do not send out a REDCap survey to your scholars. Be aware if you do send a REDCap survey out, a dropdown will show only the word “Department,” which will not make you look good. Similarly, you can enter “Resource” in the second textbox. This item will not show up on any surveys, so it is a safer hack.

Finally, at the bottom, you’ll see a series of optional fields for Person Roles and Program Roles. If configured, these items will add fields to each scholar’s Identifiers form.

Person Roles are dropdowns, from which you can select one answer to be true for each scholar. Multiple Person Roles can be added, and a new box will appear until the maximum limit is reached. Common examples of Person Roles include:

• Faculty, Student, or Staff
• Class of 2018, Class of 2019, Class of 2020, etc.

These options can be added one per line, just as with departments and resources.

Program Roles are checkboxes, from which you can select multiple answers to be true. Thus, there is just one field for Program Roles. For example, different roles might exist within a program, and one person might involve themselves with multiple over time, like Mentor, Faculty, Leader, Trainee, etc.

Click the Configure Fields button at the bottom to move to the Third Step.

The Third Setup Page: Adding Your Scholars

You’re almost there! The final setup step is to add your scholars. This page contains three ways to add scholars. I recommend the middle one, via a CSV spreadsheet as an intake form. If you want to prepare ahead of time, the intake form is available via this link. CSVs stand for Comma-Separated Values, and these files can be opened by any spreadsheet program, like Microsoft Excel. For spreadsheets, REDCap prefers to use CSVs to transfer data instead of proprietary formats, like Excel XLSX files, because of its broad support and easy decoding.

The intake form contains just a row of headers. The most important fields are in the leftmost six columns.

• The first four columns contain names. Since Flight Tracker uses names to fetch data, these columns are critical. Note: The last name field supports searching by both maiden and married names under the format maiden name-married name.
• The next column contains an email. This field is required if you plan to send out a survey.
• The next column contains any additional institutions that your scholars might belong to or have belonged to that aren’t in the “home team.”
• The remaining columns contain demographic values that describe your scholars. These fields are not required, but Flight Tracker always likes more data. Many of these contain optional values, which are described via brackets in the header. The values must match the option in the header exactly. Since most of us report our data in some way to the federal government, federal definitions undergird these categories.
• Of note, two fields are available to input a scholar’s mentor and a scholar’s ORCID identifier.
• Because of their heavy influence in career success, mentors play a special analytic role in Flight Tracker.
• ORCID identifiers are like Social Security numbers for publications and grants – they uniquely identify scholars even if they have the same name. Because they are unique, having an ORCID will save you time wrangling inexact data in Flight Tracker. We highly recommend that scholars use ORCIDs aggressively. More information can be found at www.orcid.org.

Submit your scholars’ names when complete, and you’re done with the setup!

Next Steps

At this point, your unique situation determines your next steps. Some of the following six categories might aid your journey. You are encouraged to explore the menus and discover what might help you best. The following topics will be discussed here:

• Using the Connectivity Tester to ensure that you can access the data sources.
• Collecting all your data tonight… in case you’re like me, impatient to act on a new project.
• Checking for data holes and doing an initial round of publication wrangling after your data come in.
• Adding new scholars to your project that you didn’t add via the intake form.
• Modifying your project’s configuration settings, the ones you just entered.
• And joining our Getting Started calls and accessing other forms of support.

Connectivity Tester

Especially if you’re the first person to set up a Flight Tracker project on your REDCap server, you probably should check whether your server has access to all the online data sources that provide data. A network firewall can block data exchange between your REDCap server and outside data sources. Fortunately, your REDCap admins can contact network administrators to allow certain websites access across the firewall.

To check whether any sites might need special permission, you can run the Test Connectivity page under the General menu. It will check each of Flight Tracker’s data sources for access. If data transmission is open, then it’ll come back with green. If it’s blocked, it’ll come back with red. If it’s yellow, it means that the request went out but never came back. If it remains yellow after ten-or-so seconds, I usually refresh the page in my web browser. Persistent yellow across multiple refreshes should be considered as a blocked site.

You should email your REDCap admins any blocked sites & URLs that you encounter and ask that they add them to the network’s “allow list.” Usually, this step is easily done.

If all your sites are blocked, you may have a proxy server operative for your REDCap server. Likely, your REDCap admins will have to set up the proxy server information in Flight Tracker’s configuration for each Flight Tracker project. The configuration is available under the General menu on the Configure Application page. Towards the bottom, a section for proxy servers exists. If you or they encounter persistent problems with your proxy server, please email flighttracker@vumc.org.

Collecting All Data Tonight

Usually, when I start a new project, I want to get all the data as soon as possible. The soonest Flight Tracker can provide a full set of data is the next morning after setup. To collect all your data overnight, go to Flight Tracker’s Home page on the leftmost item on the menu. Then click the link to “Run All Updates Tonight.” Doing so will enqueue all pulls for your project the next time Flight Tracker processes its jobs, usually at midnight. If you do not click this link, Flight Tracker will update its data throughout the course of the week.

After Your Data Come In

At first, you need to make sure your data are pulling in correctly. This step verifies that your institutional names and individual scholars’ names are correct. You only need to do this once when setting a project up because once verified, the system should continue working and pulling in new data. The best page to view your data for this purpose is REDCap’s Record Status Dashboard, available on the lefthand toolbar when on a REDCap page, in the Data Collection section above Add/Edit Records.

The Record Status Dashboard page is one big table. Each row represents one scholar’s record; each column is one instrument that stores data in REDCap. Holding your mouse over a column’s header will describe the instrument’s contents. Each cell in the table has a circular icon that represents whether data is populated. The legend for the icons is in a grey box at the top of the page.

At first, most of the table in a new project will be grey. This is fine and expected. We’ll focus on two data types that involve most of our biomedical scholars. Of course, if a scholar lacks data, the status will be grey, but the following indicators often work for most projects:

• PubMed publications are pulled into the Citation instrument. The icon for multiple items is normal. Check for people who you expect to have publications to have data. Any color other than grey indicates the presence of data.
• Similarly, NIH grants are indicated in the NIH RePORTER instrument. Less people have such grants. Check whether individuals who you know to have grants actually have data.

When data are improperly missing for everyone in one column, then two problems predominate: Either your REDCap server can’t connect to the data source, in which case you should run the Connectivity Tester, or your institutional names incorrectly match what is on PubMed or the NIH RePORTER, as described earlier in The First Setup Page. You can adjust institutional names on the General menu’s Configure Application page.

When data are improperly missing for a set of individuals but not for everyone, then a name-matching problem is the most likely culprit. You can go to the data source’s webpage – where you manually search the site – to see how your scholar’s name is reported on that source. It needs to match what’s there, including initials. You can adjust a scholar’s name at the top of the Identifiers form according to the conventions described there. Remember that nicknames are supported in parentheses and maiden names are supported via hyphens.

If a scholar is missing some or all data for a given instrument, you might also have problems matching to the individual’s prior institutions. If so, you should identify a list of institutions from the data source and add a Position Change form on that scholar’s record. Other parts of Flight Tracker will reuse Position Change data whenever needed, like with the NIH Training Tables. One Position Change instance should be added for each institution.

Finally, if you’re like me, you’d like to confirm that you did the right thing or see if you need to make further adjustments. Who wants to wait until the next day to check? To confirm, go to the scholar’s record. You’ll notice that several buttons will appear above the menu on top. Click the Fetch Data Now button for the appropriate category – for our example, either Publications, Grants, or both. When complete, you can refresh your page and see if the data have come in. If not, continue to research and adjust the names and institutions. All data pulls involve these two items, along with perhaps ORCID identifiers.

Adding New Scholars

New scholars can be added to your project at any time; the list you added in your setup was not your final opportunity to add scholars. You can do so via the Scholars menu on the Add a New Scholar page.

Two main ways exist to add scholars. First, to add one or two scholars, the top form can be used to add them one at a time. Second, to add many scholars at one time, you can use the intake form, downloadable via the words “this example” in the middle section or via this link. This intake form is the same one you used during setup. You can edit it using a spreadsheet program and upload it on this page.

Modifying Your Settings

All Flight Tracker configuration items, including all those in the initial setup, can be modified anytime via the General menu’s Configure Application page. This link is conveniently available at the gear or cog icon in the upper righthand corner of the Flight Tracker menu. After you make changes, just make sure you click a button to save your settings lest they be lost!

Getting Started Calls & Support

Flight Tracker currently offers multiple options for technical support:

• A monthly Getting Started with Flight Tracker call addresses questions about getting the ball rolling with a new project. You must inquire about when the next call will happen.
• A monthly Flight Tracker Consortium meeting talks about what’s new with Flight Tracker, what’s next, and a deep dive on an educational topic. These meetings occur on the first Wednesday of each month at 1pm Central Time and are open to any interested parties.
• Almost all past Flight Tracker Consortium meetings are recorded. Videos going back to 2020 are available in the Video Vault available via a link on Flight Tracker’s website at redcap.link/flight_tracker. The topic of each Deep Dive is listed for each video along with the date.
• A monthly Troubleshooting meeting addresses any difficulties and bugs with Flight Tracker. These meetings are 100% driven by user questions, and abundant screen sharing takes place to learn about issues. These occur on the third Wednesday of each month at 1pm Central Time and are also open to all.
• Finally, an online support forum is available at redcap.vumc.org/flighttracker. A free account is required to access this site, and after logging in, you can peruse other users’ questions. Software developer Rob Taylor built the code for this forum to support REDCap and graciously shared it with our group. This forum is the best way to present a bug or a difficult question to get an immediate answer, before the next Troubleshooting meeting.

Email flighttracker@vumc.org to ask more about any of these options.