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Choosing your Organisational UnitsChoosing your Organisational Units

When you begin your Pure implementation, you may already have an established list of organisational units (such as faculties and departments) that you use to report on and showcase your research activity, which you can simply replicate in Pure. Beyond the obvious research-producing faculties and departments, however, it is common to be undecided about whether to add certain organisations or organisation types to your Pure.

Organisational Units are the first data records you add to your Pure, so it can be difficult to understand the implications of decisions you make about them for the rest of your data. This page sets out some common special cases and the recommended courses of action for each, along with a decision matrix that will help you understand the implications of whatever you decide. No prior understanding of the other Pure modules (Portal, Reporting, Award Management, CV, or Assessment) is assumed.

For each type of entity you wish to add to your Pure, you should consider the following:

What information do you need to record about these entities, especially concerning their lifecycle?
What other types of records (e.g. Persons or Research Outputs) do you need to relate to these entities? How will you maintain these relations?
How and where do you want to showcase these entities on your Portal - or should they not show at all?
What reports do you need to make on these entities and any related records (e.g. Persons or Research Outputs)?

The answers to these questions will help you decide whether you should create the entities in your scenario as:

Organisational Units within the main hierarchy (example: Leeds Trinity's Research Centres)
Organisational Units outside of the main hierarchy (example: University of Portsmouth's Research Centres and University of Brighton's Centres and Groups)
Projects (example: University of Strathclyde's Knowledge Exchange Projects)
Keywords (example: Edge Hill's Research Institutes, Research Centres, and Research Groups)

Special cases

Please note that the names of the entities listed below may not correspond to the names you use at your institution, since they are generalisations of common scenarios (for example, you might have entities called ‘Research Groups’ that resemble the definition of Research Centres below more closely than that of Research Groups). Please read the definitions of each carefully to understand which are applicable in your case.

Former Organisational Units

You should add former Organisational Units - those that have closed - if the following applies:

You wish to add Research Outputs from a legacy system that should be related to Organisational Units that no longer exist AND/OR
You wish to report on other data (e.g. Persons or Research Outputs) that would be associated with former units AND/OR
You wish to showcase former units, or other data (e.g. Persons or Research Outputs) that would be associated with former units, on the Portal AND/OR
You wish to import data (e.g. Research Outputs) with affiliations to former units from online sources AND/OR
You wish to connect current Organisational Units with former ones using the ‘Taken over by’ field.

Organisational Unit records become ‘former’ when their End Date field contains a date in the past. Such Organisational Units are clearly marked as former, both in the backend and on the Portal. You can configure your Portal so that former units are not displayed.

Administrative Organisational Units

Administrative Organisational Units are those to which only administrative (non-academic) staff are affiliated. Only add them to your Pure if there is an explicit need; remember that Pure is a research information management system. Consider the criteria listed in the decision matrix below.

Administrative Organisational Units are not defined in any particular way in Pure. You should create a value in the Organisational Unit type classification scheme, or a keyword tag, to group them. If you do not wish to display them on the Portal, you can set the visibility to ‘Backend’ for each record, or Elsevier can configure your Portal so that units of a certain Organisational Unit type are not displayed.

Research Centres/Institutes

Research Centres are a type of Organisational Unit to which research (academic and potentially also non-academic) staff may be affiliated. You should create a value in the Organisational Unit type classification scheme to group Research Centres.

Research Centres are often interdisciplinary, and therefore do not fit neatly into the organisational hierarchy. If you wish to affiliate staff from multiple other departments/faculties to a Research Centre, and these staff should not be shown as related to Research Centre's parent Organisational Unit(s) on the Portal, but you have recursive relations switched on for Organisational Units (at Administrator > Pure Portal > Organisational Units), you should add Research Centres as Organisational Units outside of the organisational hierarchy, or in a parallel hierarchy. Many Pure clients create an imaginary umbrella unit called ‘Research Centres' for the purposes of display on the Pure Portal. Note that such an imaginary unit will also appear in reports, which can cause confusion. Example: Lund's Profile areas and other strong research environments

Research Groups/Clusters

Research Groups or Clusters are groups of academic staff who work on the same topic - in Pure terms, they are groups of Persons. Depending on how your institution uses Research Groups, you should create them as Organisational Units (with a value in the Organisational Unit type classification scheme to group them), Projects or keywords.

Research Areas/Themes/Strands/Priorities

Research Areas are topics that an institution has chosen to focus on - in Pure terms, they are ways to group editorial data (e.g. Research Outputs, Activities or Projects) and optionally Persons too. Depending on how your institution uses Research Areas, you should create them as Projects or keywords.

Knowledge Exchanges/Beacons

Knowledge Exchange perspectives are different ways of looking at academic collaborations with external partners, such as businesses or community groups - in Pure terms, they are ways to group editorial data (e.g. Research Outputs, Activities or Projects) and optionally Persons too. Depending on how your institution uses Knowledge Exchange perspectives, you should create them as Projects or keywords.

Decision matrix

Criteria	Organisational Unit within main hierarchy	Organisational Unit outside main hierarchy	Project	Keyword
Create a record for the entity to store data about it, e.g. its lifecycle	X	X	X
Assign the entity parent(s) and/or a child or children in the organisational hierarchy	X
Relate Person records to the entity, with information about their role in it	X	X	X
Update Person relations to the entity in a Person synchronization	X	X		X
Affiliate staff to the entity without them being rescursively related to the entity's parent organisation(s) on the Portal		X	X
Make the entity a Managing Organisational Unit of editorial data	X	X
Assign the entity a Managing Organisational Unit			X
Import data from online sources with affiliations to the entity	X	X
Create a tag for the entity that can be applied to records of one or multiple content types				X
Process the entity in award management workflows			X
Report on all data related to the entity at once	X	X	X
Showcase the entity on its own page on the Portal	X	X	X
Use the entity as a filter for content types on the Portal and in reports	X	X	X	X

Updated at October 31, 2024