Now that Northwestern University has a license for the Scopus literature database, it's a good time to feature Northwestern Scholars, a SciVal Experts database of Northwestern faculty expertise created by the same company as Scopus (Elsevier). Northwestern Scholars draws data from Scopus, links to Scopus records, and contains publication and grant information for thousands of Northwestern faculty, as well as curricula vitae, co-authorship networks, and areas of research focus.

Northwestern Scholars is hosted by Northwestern’s Human Resources department as part of their FASIS system. It is populated by data from HR records (public data only), Northwestern’s InfoEd grants system, literature databases such as MEDLINE and Scopus, and a great deal of data entered manually by NUHR staff from NU faculty curricula vitae. While FASIS itself is open only to NU employees, Northwestern Scholars profiles can be viewed by anyone. Northwestern Scholars is also linked to the Direct2Experts collaborative information network of Clinical and Translational Science (CTSA) grant institutions.

Northwestern Scholars is valuable for:

• Graduate students searching for an advisor: just input a keyword or concept into the search box, or search by faculty name
• Research Administrators: view a list of publications from an individual faculty member or the whole department; also view a list of funding by department
• Researchers looking for collaborators: if you need a statistician or expert on linguistics, neuropsychology or pathology, you can search by concept or name, or you can paste a block of text into the Free Text Search box

Northwestern Scholars shows individual faculty research areas using the SciVal “fingerprinting” process, which harvests keywords from publications in MEDLINE and Scopus to create a profile of expertise for each researcher, division, department, or school at Northwestern.

Faculty can edit their profiles, although FSM faculty are still represented by the FSM faculty database, and should continue to update their profiles at the FSMweb faculty database. Northwestern Scholars provides a university-wide (not just FSM) database of expertise, so it supplements data found in FSMweb and in LatticeGrid, a FSM faculty network created by Warren Kibbe at NUBIC.

Northwestern Scholars also has graphical depictions of research networks and publications trends for each author, plus frequently published-in journals, similar experts at Northwestern, and co-authors, both within and outside NU.  

From the abstract view of any manuscript in Northwestern Scholars, you can link out to the Scopus record for the paper or to the full text (when available) at Northwestern libraries.

There’s more to explore at Northwestern Scholars, such as patents, a Semantic Web portal, and a listing of core facilities. To learn more about it and see faculty profiles use these links:

• Northwestern Scholars (home page)
• Northwestern Scholars FAQs