Q. How do I use Symplectic to capture my publications and professional activities?

Symplectic enables staff and postgraduate research students at LJMU to capture their publications and professional activities. These are then visible on your staff profile. New members of staff are added to the system automatically. On campus you will not need to logon. Off campus you can logon to Symplectic using your LJMU username and password. 

How do I capture my research publications that were conducted at a different institution?

You can reset your personal search criteria on the homepage of the system to include the name of the former institution from which you published. Care is needed here to ensure that you do not return a large number of false positive results from other researchers with the same name (which will mean you will need to spend some time during the confirmation process de-selecting each).

If you are not going to publish in the future from your former institution, once you have completed the search you can simply remove its name from the search terms in order to minimise the possibility of false positives being returned.

For help with deposits, please Check what and when to deposit from Symplectic to LJMU's institutional repository LJMU Research Online.

Why has the system failed to automatically capture all my research publications?

There are a number of possible reasons for this:

• The search terms may need to be changed or refined. Caution is advised here because of the possibility of capturing false information (settings can initially be tested on Web of Science). For example, your name may have changed, or you may have published using a variant of the standard University address.
• The subject coverage of journals and conferences recorded by Web of Science, PubMed and ArXiv, while improving, is not comprehensive across all disciplines. Coverage is best in the life and physical sciences and less good in engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities.
• Despite the fact that the depth and scope of coverage of the online databases the system searches are improving all the time, certain types of publication remain under-represented. This includes books, book chapters, reports, certain conference proceedings and performances. Such data can be added manually. For example, all that is needed to enter details of a book is the ISBN – the system then enters all the bibliographic data automatically. Alternatively, such data can be uploaded from an existing database, such as EndNote.

How do I change my default name settings?

The system will initially set the search term for your name (for example, Andrew J Young) as Surname Initials (for example, Young AJ). If this is how you always author your publications, then this can be left as it is. However, if you find that the initial search using this default name setting does not return as many publications as you expected, you can add additional name variants.

You can do this on your homepage, under search settings. Using the example above, you could set both Young A and Young J as alternate default search terms. See the help guides (available on the system) for full details. The next time the system runs an automated search (which may be up to two weeks later) it will search using these revised terms.
 

My subject area is not well covered by Web of Science, PubMed or ArXiv. How can I capture my publication details and enter them on the system?

For some subjects, manual entry of publication information may be necessary. This is simple and straightforward and can be achieved by cutting and pasting details from your current CV. For books, an ISBN is all that is needed. For book chapters, simply enter the ISBN and the title and page numbers of your chapter.

If you already use a personal bibliographic system, such as EndNote or BibTex, you can upload these details to the University system. You may also be able to download a search from a specialist search engine (such as those managed by Engineering Village) in a format that can be uploaded onto the University system.

My discipline uses its own international publication database. Can I capture these publications from the University system?

If you can download the results of a search for your publications from, for example, Compendex, in an appropriate format (such as EndNote or BibTex), you should be able to upload the search results onto the University system.

Why are the citation counts missing from some of my journal articles?

Citation counts are only currently available for journal articles captured from Web of Science. Citation counts are not available for publications from PubMed and ArXiv or for those you have entered manually.

Why is my publication not in the right place on my staff profile?

The most likely reason is because there isn't a publication date in the publication field. For items that have been deposited to the repository, the Researcher Engagement Team will update the details once the paper is published. This is regularly checked by the team and includes replacing the accepted version with the Open Access published version if appropriate. Once the status of your article is changed to published and the date added from the publisher site, the system will automatically update your profile the next day.

If for any reason your publications are still not appearing in the correct order, please email the title of the output, published date and DOI to openaccess@ljmu.ac.uk.

Where can I get assistance or training?

User guides (in PDF format) are available on the help page of the Symplectic system. To access the guides, please use the navigation button at the top of the system screen. If you cannot find the solution you want, or you want to enquire about training for yourself or your school, please contact our Symplectic Help Team with your query.