Faculty Information and Evaluations

Faculty Insight is a search tool that enables scholars to find experts at their institution and nationally. Scholar profiles are pre-populated with recent activity data sourced from Academic Analytics. This includes articles, books, grants, awards, conference proceedings, and patents. Currently MU also supplements Faculty Insight data with additional faculty activity sourced from myVITA. There are plans to augment Academic Analytics data with myVITA data for faculty at all four universities. Scholar profiles are also fed to the public-facing University of Missouri Faculty Scholars webpage. For more information on Faculty Insight, please view the Faculty Insight User Guide.

All tenured/tenure-track faculty in all academic units (including Law and clinical/medical disciplines) and ranked non-tenure-track research faculty. Currently, ranked clinical faculty who have grants are also included. 

Currently for MU faculty the Faculty Insight data and works published on the University of Missouri Faculty Scholars web page data are supplemented with information that has been entered into myVITA. The idea is that faculty do not need to add activities to both myVITA and Faculty Insight. There are plans for faculty at all four universities to have the Faculty Insight data augmented with myVITA data. To see how the data in myVITA map into Faculty Insight, please view the myVITA mapping document.

Not at this time.

The Faculty Insight Guide is available to support faculty, staff and students. Users can learn to manage their research profile and search for scholars with whom to collaborate and find funding that matches your research interests.

You may also contact your campuses' Institutional Research or Institutional Effectiveness offices if you have questions or need assistance.

IR/IE Offices

• MU IR:  www.irqi.missouri.edu
• UMKC:  https://data.umkc.edu
• UMSL:  www.umsl.edu/~ir/
• S&T:  www.data.mst.edu

The Display column allows the user to choose how and whether the item should be displayed. The options are: Public, Private and Internal. The default view for all activities is “Public”. The Public setting means that the activity will be available to all Faculty Insight users and visible on any external pages being populated by this content. Changing the display setting to Internal limits that item’s visibility to just institutional Faculty Insight users. Changing the display setting to Private means that only the faculty themselves will be able to see the activity.

MU: In myVITA, under Profile, there is a new section “External Facing Website Options”. Here you can add a research profile that will be added to your Faculty Insight profile and public facing profile on UM Faculty Scholars website. In addition there is an Opt-out Option that you can use to not have any of your myVITA data displayed on the UM Faculty Scholars website.

By default, myVITA data feed into Faculty Insight with a Public display. If you choose to opt-out, all myVITA data will have a display of Internal. Each record display can be managed individually in Faculty Insight. As the Academic Analytics data are sourced from publicly available resources, these records default to Public and can be managed individually by faculty.

If a record sourced from myVITA is set to Private, it will remain set to Private, even if a faculty member changes their mind from the Opt-out Option in the “External Facing Website Options” section under Profile in myVITA.

How does the keyword search work

The keyword search uses natural language processing techniques and targeted algorithms to compare keyword(s) against profile data and identify relevant scholars and grant opportunities. Data that have been pulled into Faculty Insight from myVITA are included in these algorithms.

Academic Analytics generates a set of key research terms for each scholar by comparing research activity from that individual against all available research activity data. The more often a term appears in a specific scholar’s research activity data, relative to the number of times the term appears in all data in the collection, the more closely associated the term is to the scholar.

Academic Analytics compiles data from federal, university, and private sources. Article and Conference Proceeding publication data are obtained directly from publishers, using digital object identifiers (DOI®). Citation data are derived via DOI®-to- DOI® linkages based on the literature cited section of published journal articles and conference proceedings. Book data are collected from the British Library catalog and Baker and Taylor, Inc. Grant data are collected from federal granting agencies and select private sources. Patent data are obtained from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization. Honorific Award information is derived from publicly available information from national governing societies. Performance and Exhibit data can be added directly to Faculty Insight by faculty. Currently, MU is augmenting the data from Academic Analytics with data provided by faculty in myVITA.

Scholar profile keywords are matched to funding opportunity data from a third-party funding database.  Grant opportunities are updated daily and contain approximately 40,000 open funding opportunities from over 10,000 public and private entities. Funding opportunities may be filtered by using the filter button on the left-hand side.

There may be significant overlap in the lists. Pivot is a very powerful funding opportunities database to which MU subscribes. Based on criteria you identify, you can search opportunities, set up alerts to be sent to your email on a weekly basis, and forward opportunities to potential collaborators. Pivot will also recommend opportunities based on your Pivot profile. It is up to you to vet those opportunities to determine whether they are a good fit. Academic Analytics identifies funding opportunities based on your profile and qualifications. In essence, Academic Analytics does some of the vetting for you. Please note that no single tool will capture every opportunity, so we recommend employing a multi-pronged approach to finding funding. And be sure you read the solicitation/guidelines carefully before preparing a proposal.

Contact the staff who help prepare and submit proposals in your school or college. They will guide you through the submission process. If you are unclear who to contact, contact your department chair or the Office of Sponsored Programs (GrantsDC@missouri.edu). Let OSPA know your home department, and they will connect you with the appropriate staff.

MU: The MU Research Development Network includes research development professionals in various divisions, departments and units across campus. The Network meets monthly to share resources, information and talent; support each other’s professional development; forge interdisciplinary collaborations; and advance MU's extramural funding agenda. The following website provides more information and school/college/center contacts: https://research.missouri.edu/ospa/rdn.php.