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Explore the transformative potential of generative AI in university-research administration. As universities strive to enhance research capabilities and support a culture of innovation, the need for efficient and effective management of sponsored programs has become paramount. This presentation will share lessons from deploying a sponsored programs’ Large Language Model Chatbot and how it optimizes research administration operations and unlocks opportunities. By harnessing the power of GenAI, a university office of sponsored programs chatbot can develop training materials, policies and SOPs. It can offer immediate support and guidance by analyzing queries and providing real-time responses, empowering staff members to overcome challenges and reducing time on tasks. It can enhance productivity and job satisfaction. An OSP Chat will allow research administrators to focus on higher-value activities, such as strategic planning, relationship building and facilitating research collaboration resulting in improved operational effectiveness and increased capacity to support research excellence. This improves the quality of research administration services. This presentation will highlight the collaboration of AI experts, research administrators and stakeholders to tailor LLM to the research administration's needs, maximizing staff benefits and optimizing research support. 

Expertise Finder Systems and Research Information Management System (RIMS) provides administrators and scholars the ability to collect, curate, and highlight their research activity, and the reporting tools to assist with strategic decisions and generate meaningful outreach. Jeff Agnoli, Senior Liaison for Strategic Partnerships at the Ohio Innovation Exchange, shares his 10+ years of experience using these tools to connect industry partners and researchers across the State of Ohio and beyond. Alexandra Winzeler, Business Development Manager from Digital Science showcases the benefits and efficiencies of using Symplectic Elements to streamline research collection and promote collaboration. See how built-in integration and automation tools simplify the process of populating researcher profiles. Learn how to report on key metrics for your organization including how research outputs map to industry goals. See how easily you can leverage researcher details into professional public profiles that drive online traffic to your organization. 

Senior academic leaders face mounting pressure to communicate academic impact to various stakeholders, including faculty, students, funding bodies, government agencies, and the media. However, assessing impact extends beyond traditional bibliometrics, encompassing influence on policy, culture, environment, and technology, making it complex to define and measure. Moreover, the interpretation of research impact can vary significantly depending on the perspective. In this discussion, we explore how Elsevier leverages AI to integrate quantitative metrics and qualitative narratives, offering a comprehensive approach to addressing the nuanced challenge of understanding and quantifying research impact. Through real-world examples, we demonstrate the efficacy of this approach and present innovative visualization techniques for conveying impact. 

Clinical study startup is one of the most time and resource-intensive parts of the clinical trials. Its impacts are long-lasting, as delays can affect the study conduct. For study startups, 85% of the industry still relies on Excel spreadsheets. But spreadsheets are passive – they don’t allow you to proactively manage activities and don’t tell you where to focus your attention. We designed, implemented, and now fully adopted a new comprehensive workflow centered around a Smartsheet-based solution with automated reports and dashboards for clinical research coordinators (CRCs), managers, faculty, and leadership. We seek to standardize the startup process across the Radiology Department and provide clarity, transparency, and accountability for all identified tasks. By extensively using our own data, we will achieve better planning with realistic completion dates and thus optimize resource allocation (e.g., accurate planning for reassigning/hiring of CRCs to facilitate subsequent study execution). 

This session is a basic introduction to descriptive statistics for research administration professionals. No worries! Excel will be used throughout, nothing will be calculated by hand. Averages (means), medians, standard deviations, correlations and other basic statistical concepts will be explained using only research administration data as context. A sample research administration data set will be provided and Excel will be used to analyze the data. Some sample charts and best practices in creating these charts will also be shown. Again using Excel. This is the perfect session for anyone in research administration whose roles include analyzing data using descriptive statistics. Whether you are new to statistics or whether you can't remember a statistics class you might have taken at some point. Basic knowledge of Excel would be helpful for this session. 

This session will present on how to develop basic research administration dashboards using Tableau. A sample research administration dataset will be provided in Excel for anyone who would like to work along. Using that data set the presenter will show step by step how to import the data into Tableau and how to create basic worksheets and dashboards. Calculations and filters will be shown also. Attendees should download a trial version of Tableau the same week as the conference if they would like to work along the presenter. 

The 2018 Evidence Act has mandated US government departments and agencies to be much clearer about their research agendas and the engagement they want with academic researchers and institutions. Tracking those engagements has become easier as data providers increasingly supply information on policy engagement or policy citations, tracking where academics at an institution have been cited in or mentioned by name in government reports and policy documents at a local, state or federal level. This session covers the processes, policies and best practice you need to put in place to start using policy engagement data responsibly, both to track and report on existing engagements and to find hotspots where government has questions that your institution could be doing more to help answer. We'll show which kinds of institutional strategies benefit most and least from policy data, the differences between scholarly and policy citations, the most important biases and caveats to investigate and include in reports, and describe some examples of best practice at other research universities. 

The use of data and analytics in the field of research administration remains in explorations stages for many, if not most, higher education institutions. That is evidenced not only by the great demand and attendance seen for such sessions at NCURA’s Annual Meetings in 2022 and 2023, but also via prior research. This presentation will highlight the efforts implementing data-informed decision making based on research administration metrics, analytics, and dashboard examples. Emphasis will be placed on that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. The data analytics team at Emory supports all visions of our research administration leadership. Challenges, pain points, and lessons learned will be shared. Reasons for implementing collecting data and metrics will be shown. These include improving operational efficiencies, stakeholder satisfaction (e.g., faculty), as well as providing analytical insights to decision makers. The benefits of such initiatives will also be depicted with examples of successfully implemented metrics and analytics, including dashboard examples. 

‘Research Impact’ as a defined concept is expanding and garnering more attention globally. What was once positioned more narrowly and often confused with basic outcomes reporting has since risen to a primary focus for sponsor agencies across all stages of R&D. Hence, building a comprehensive research impact framework provides a critical map for universities to strengthen the R&D ecosystems in which it engages in innumerable ways. Khalifa University of Science and Technology (KU), located in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is a relatively a young university, by Times Higher Education definition). Even so, KU ranked 238 in the QS World University Rankings 2024, stands second in the Arab World and UAE (Times Higher Education Arab University Rankings 2023). In the current funding landscape globally, universities and governments approach to research impact is largely centered on quantitative metrics, such as publication counts in top ranked journals or number of patents filed. KU recognizes that these qualitative metrics, many of which feed into the core methodologies of broad global university rankings, are important dimensions of measuring R&D successes. However, KU also strives to capture the wide range of qualitative impacts our research activities yield, which can be more difficult to track and communicate than traditional quantitative metrics allow. In this presentation, I will touch upon the strategies employed in developing a preliminary research framework for Khalifa University. While there are steps that remain before full implementation can be realized, this talk will cover the ‘conceptualization to-date’, as the foundation for introducing a research impact framework where one did not exist prior. This includes discussion of the various assessment activities, triaging pillars of the framework and their associated impact indicators, forging new- and strengthening existing- pathways for internal/external data sharing, developing processes and gaining stakeholder buy-in toward the aim of achieving a functional working model. Attendees to this talk are welcomed to bring their own lessons learned or current pain points to the conversation, for group dialogue on the challenges and opportunities that come with implementing or scaling-up research impact tracking and the utilization of such for evidenced-based R&D decision making. 

This session will be an introductory conversation to understand the fundamentals of data governance and stewardship. Attendees will be introduced to the core principles of data governance and the role of data stewards. We will talk about strategies for governance and stewardship at your institution, and how to work within roles and frameworks that may already exist at your institution. We’ll also talk about how to build this framework and external considerations you need to consider. Presented at the 2024 Research Analytics Summit in Albuquerque, NM