How Can We Help?

Defining your Organisational Unit structureDefining your Organisational Unit structure

When you begin your Pure implementation, you may already have an established structure of parent and child organisational units that you use to report on and showcase your research activity, which you can simply replicate in Pure. It is common, however, to be undecided about how to define your organisational structure in 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 the common structures used to define relationships between Organisational Units in Pure to help you decide. No prior understanding of the other Pure modules (Portal, Reporting, Award Management, CV, or Assessment) is assumed.

Note that, if you need different structures for reporting on and for showcasing your research, you can choose not to display Organisational Units on your Pure Portal, either per record with the Visibility setting or by Organisational Unit type (with Elsevier's assistance). You can also configure your Portal not to show Organisational Units at all.

When defining your Organisational Unit structure, you should consider the following:

What Organisational Units do you need in your Pure? (See Choosing your Organisational Units)
How should your organisational structure be displayed on your Portal in the hierarchy view?
How will you use your organisational structure to frame reports on your Organisational Units and any related records (e.g. Persons or Research Outputs)?

The answers to these questions will help you decide which of these options you should choose for your Organisational Unit structure:

Flat (example: Princeton University)
Single hierarchy (example: University of East Anglia)
Multiple hierarchies (example: Arizona Board of Regents)
Matrix (example: University of York's Centre for Applied Human Rights)

Types of Organisational Unit structure

Flat

A flat Organisational Unit structure does not define any parent/child relationships. This is the simplest option.

It is recommended to create a single parent Organisational Unit that bears the name of your institution, with all the other units as its children - even if you decide not to display this unit on your Portal. Some functionality requires the structure to have a single top-level Organisational Unit; exporting Research Outputs from Pure to ORCID is one example. Note that some Organisational Unit structures on Portals may appear flat when there is in fact a top-level parent Organisational Unit in the backend of the Pure, created for reporting or integration reasons, which has been prevented from displaying on the Portal.

Single hierarchy

A single hierarchy structure has one top-level parent Organisational Unit, which should bear the name of your institution, and other levels below it. For example, a university may be comprised of faculties, and under each faculty there may be departments, which themselves may contain subdepartments.

A hierarchy is created by adding a parent unit to each Organisational Unit's record. Only the immediate parent unit should be added (not the parent's parent); this creates the hierarchical structure so that Pure can aggregate data, such as Research Outputs, up from the child unit to its parent, its parent's parent, and so on. This is possible both in the Reporting module and on the Portal.

If each Organisational Unit type always belongs in the same hierarchical relation to the other types, consider building your hierarchy in the Organisational Unit type classification scheme too.

Multiple hierarchies

A multiple hierarchy structure has several top-level parent Organisational Units, each of which has other levels below it. For example, a research association may comprise several independent institutes, each of which may contain several levels of other Organisational Units. This is not a common choice.

It is recommended to create a single parent Organisational Unit that bears the name of your institution, with all the other units as its children - even if you decide not to display this unit on your Portal. Some functionality requires the structure to have a single top-level Organisational Unit; exporting Research Outputs from Pure to ORCID is one example. Note that some Organisational Unit structures on Portals may appear as multiple hierarchies when there is in fact a single top-level parent Organisational Unit in the backend of the Pure, created for reporting or integration reasons, which has been prevented from displaying on the Portal.

Matrix

In a matrix structure, one Organisational Unit may have multiple parent units (as well as multiple levels of child units). This is the most complex option. It is sometimes necessary for interdisciplinary units, such as Research Centres (for alternative ways of registering Research Centres, see Choosing your Organisational Units).

When two or more parents are assigned to a child unit, it is possible to select one of them as the reporting Organisational Unit, preventing the data for the child unit counting multiple times across a report. However, the child unit will still appear twice in the hierarchy view of the Organisational Unit structure on the Portal - once under each parent.

Assigning multiple parents to an Organisational Unit will not affect how data is aggregated on the Portal. For example, a Person that is affiliated with a Level 3 unit that has two Level 2 parents will not appear twice in the list of Persons for the Level 1 parent unit of both Level 2 units.

Updated at October 31, 2024