Creating Centralized Platforms: ULisboa’s Scholar

Our Principles

When starting to plan out our design process, we knew there were two major aspects to focus on:

• Unity: Giving the University of Lisbon, as a whole, a space to store all its scientific production;
• Simplicity: Easing the process of creating and maintaining scientific publications for our key targets;
• Flexibility: Giving our users the freedom to define how their research is defined regardless of system suggestions.

How Did We Achieve Our Goals?

Our audience is elusive, so we needed to fully inhabit their world, aiming to make the complex simple. Given the intricacies of modern repositories, we had to distill and iterate incessantly, to transform challenging concepts into a simple user experience — especially in a web app like Scholar, that must cover a lot of situations in simplified ways.

Through this iterative process, we confirmed our assumptions: by getting the analysis and discovery right, complexity became malleable and easy to handle in bite-sized iterations that accumulated into major features of the product. Here's some examples of how we, aligned with our principles, achieved our goals.

External Repository Integration

Researchers are sending their publications to other repos, and becoming faithful to their use, so how can we change that pattern?

With Scholar, we enabled researchers to link external repository accounts, allowing seamless publication imports to store past or external work. Users can also upload publications by importing reference management files, like Bibtex. We provide the option for Admins to customize the default repository list, so as to capture different sources other than ORCID, Scopus or DBLP.

Notification Central

In the past repos from faculties, users had no idea of what was going on, who edited their publications or the state of their reports…

But now, Scholar’s notification system provides tailored updates, keeping researchers updated on interactions with their work, while admins can track key activity across domains. Visual cues like color coding and icons simplify prioritization, to ensure fast responses.

Detection of Inconsistencies & Duplicates

In our user testing, we discovered that managing publications can be torture for researchers, especially when it involves manually checking for errors and duplicates.

Scholar detects and flags duplicates and inconsistencies in imported publications, identifying and suggesting identical content that can be merged manually or automatically. To ensure focus to these activities, users receive alerts to manage these suggestions directly in their Task area, keeping them on track of this work.