Interfolio Data Service enables universities and colleges to realize full impact of academic data
WASHINGTON, D.C. — September 28, 2020 — Interfolio, pioneer of the Faculty Information System used by universities and colleges worldwide, today announced the release of the Interfolio Data Service (IDS), its newest offering that provides faculty and administrators with a streamlined way to import, validate, and make actionable their faculty’s scholarly contributions.
Interfolio’s experience with higher education scholars and administrators over the past 20 years has revealed ongoing inefficiencies and burdens placed on institutions around this process. IDS provides a holistic solution and decreases the high administrative load for faculty and staff. Used in combination with its market-leading Faculty Activity Reporting, IDS retrieves scholarly data from an ever-expanding set of multi-disciplinary sources representing over 230 million citations and 60,000 journals.
IDS enables its clients to take full advantage of established sources of scholarly data. The data service handles the complex processing and preparation of multiple independent data sources into a single feed—which is deduplicated and matched to specific faculty through machine learning algorithms. Within the platform, faculty can easily review and validate each record before it is saved to their ongoing faculty profile. This validation capability allows faculty to claim records as their own, creating trustworthy data for the scholar and the institution.
With its regular ingestion of data, IDS enables ongoing accuracy and maintenance of faculty records, and by extension, faculty profiles—for past, current, and future scholarship. This process stands in contrast to other methods like CV parsing or manual data loads, which leads to quickly outdated information. IDS keeps the data accurate as faculty members keep producing new research and publications.
“As one of the nation’s leading research universities, we continuously ask ourselves ‘how can we better support our faculty?'” states Paul Welty, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Innovation and Faculty Affairs, at Emory University. “Given the importance of our faculty’s research output and worldwide impact, we want to offer an improved, streamlined way for how scholarship is entered and audited in our faculty activity reporting system and how it populates faculty profiles in order to help further amplify and showcase their great scholarly contributions.”
With its place within the Faculty Information System, IDS offers distinctive value for faculty, allowing data to be used within profiles of Faculty Activity Reporting, powering CVs, accreditation reports, and institutional storytelling. Additionally, with the integration between the Interfolio Faculty Activity Reporting and Interfolio Review, Promotion, and Tenure modules, the data from IDS can be used for faculty evaluations. This actionability of the data creates value for faculty to validate and approve the data, as it populates their activity reports and reviews.
“Scholarly data—coupled with the ability to harness the power of its significance—is the foundation of the Faculty Information System. The Interfolio Data Service, with its groundbreaking validation of federated and disambiguated data, centers faculty scholarship,” states Andrew Rosen, CEO of Interfolio. “The Data Service represents our continued evolution of the Faculty Information System as a platform and demonstrates our commitment to focusing on faculty and digitally streamlining historically arduous tasks.”
The Interfolio Data Service is now available as part of Interfolio’s Faculty Information System platform. For more information, visit www.interfolio.com.
ABOUT INTERFOLIO
Conceived by academics for academics, Interfolio is an education technology company headquartered in Washington, DC, USA and in Cambridge, England, UK. Founded in 1999, Interfolio operates the acclaimed Faculty Information System for colleges and universities, the Researchfish impact assessment platform for funders and research organizations, and the widely used Dossier service for individual scholars. Over 300 clients based in 15 countries choose Interfolio’s technology for hiring and recruitment, academic appointments and timelines, activity data reporting, faculty reviews and promotions, and research impact analysis. Interfolio provides scholar-first products for the full academic lifecycle—from job seeking to professional accomplishments, committee service, funding award compliance, career growth and advancement, administrative leadership, and beyond. For more information about Interfolio, please contact team@interfolio.com.