Research Interests

UNSW Medicine websites contain individual profiles of the research and teaching interests of our faculty's academic and research community. The profiles are designed to provide a snapshot of academic staff research / teaching interests for a non-specialist as well as a specialist audience. The resource allows you to maintain an accurate and up-to-date summary of your interests and to bring your work to the attention of a broad local and international audience. Not only does this bring credit to your work, but it advances the standing of UNSW Medicine as a whole and serves as a key promotional tool for the faculty.

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How does Research Interests work?

The research profile pro-forma is composed of a number of free-text fields that are maintained by the individual. Not only does the research profile form gather data from a series of free-text fields, it also feeds in data from the Faculty's Staff Directory and the Postgraduate Students database. Many web views of the profiles are derived from the broad research terms listing that is updated annually (see below). While staff must select terms from this list in order to be displayed on faculty websites, staff can also devise their own specific keywords that further define their research profile. These fields and most of the others in the profile are indexable and can therefore be found with search engines.

A number of automated processes (profile creation, archiving, emails) are designed to maintain the system in terms of the currency of information. Staff are expected to maintain their profiles themselves. If they do not maintain their profiles, the profile will eventually be archived. Warning emails will be sent out before this happens, and opening and editing a profile will make it current and "live" again.

General Rules

• Following the appointment or re-appointment of academic staff, a research profile will be created or re-activated and the staff member notified by email.

• Update reminders will be sent out periodically to all staff who have current profiles.

• Profiles that remain un-updated for a period of more than eighteen months will be automatically archived thus removing them from the web. While archived profiles may be removed from public display, it will be possible to access your profile and re-activate it by re-editing and saving the profile.

• If the Research Statement field is not filled and at least one broad research term is not selected, then the profile will not be displayed regardless of other fields you may have filled.

General Instructions

To ensure that your profile is "live" you will need to define (by selecting broad and specific terms) and describe (in the form of a non-technical statement) your research (and/or teaching) interests; and you will be prompted to selectively list your key works (publications, etc.). URLs may be included in the key works field. You may copy and paste your details from a Word processing program, such as MS Word, but be sure that you copy and paste plain text without formatting elements, such as underlines, italics, tabs or bullet points, etc. Bear in mind that not every field on the profile page is editable. Before you attempt to complete your profile, we advise that you:

1. Read through the step-by-step instructions on the editable profile page carefully.
2. Test save the page to ensure that the page is operating correctly.

Click on the following link page to edit your profile page: http://www.med.unsw.edu.au/resinterests.nsf/login?openform&login

You will be prompted for your staff number and UniPass. If you do not know your UniPass, please contact the UNSW ServiceDesk on 02 9385 1333 to have it reset.

After saving your changes/updates, view your profile as it appears on the Faculty website.

If you are experiencing technical problems entering your information or if you are not comfortable with completing your profile page online, you can email the database administrator at with your question / description of problem.

Recent Changes (2008)

• Independent Learing Project (ILP) - an option is provided to list your interest in supervising ILP students. Select from a thesaurus of keywords to display the areas of research available.

• BSc (Med) Honours - an option is provided to list the project topics for current BSc (Med) Honours students you supervise.

• Web link - option to insert your School/Unit website URL. This is addition to the web link option at 'Further Information'. Note: On the input form it is located at the bottom, however, it will display on the web near the top directly underneath the School name.

• Changes to Broad Research terms. New terms are listed below.
  
  New Terms
  Disease Modelling
  Drug Related Harm / Addiction
  Embryology
  Urology
  
  Modified Terms
  Obstetrics and Gynaecology BECOME Obstetrics / Gynaecology
  Cancer BECOMES Cancer / Oncology
  Arthritis BECOMES Arthritis / Rheumatology
  
  Removed Terms
  Behaviour (see Psychiatry)
  Bone (see Orthopaedics)

Previous Changes (2005/06)

• The Research Statement field only allows a single paragraph of text (max 100 words).

• An optional Further Information field allows for a URL that points to a personal lab / research group / etc. page.

• Publications information (as collected by UNSW Research Services) is currently not used on Faculty sites. The Key Works / Publications field in your research profile is the official source for the publications you wish to list. If you have a long list (longer than two web pages), please attach it.

• As of 30 May 2006 the broad research terms have been updated. If your profile currently uses recently modified or removed terms, they will no longer be available when you go into edit mode. The edit form itemises new, modified and removed terms.

New Terms
Bioethics
Clinical Governance
Evidence Based Medicine
Global Health
Health Policy
Health Promotion
Indigenous Health
Neurodegenerative Diseases
Neurotrauma
Obesity
Population Health
Preventive Medicine

Modified Terms
Molecular Structure and Drug Design - Drug Delivery BECOME Molecular Structure & Drug Design
Rural Medicine BECOMES Rural Health
Injury Prevention BECOMES Injury
Paediatrics BECOMES Paediatrics & Child Health

Removed Terms
Radiology
Connective Tissue
Genetic Basis of Bone Disease

Annual Reviews

Through the efforts of the Associate Dean (Research) we are endeavouring to formalise reviews of this resource, and a necessary process is to review the broad research list of terms, which means adding new terms and removing old terms. This process involves the Associate Dean contacting senior research staff and mediating input via the Research Planning Committee. The aim of this process is to ensure that the resource remains relevant through continued attention and development.

History

The list of terms was originally devised by the former dean, Bruce Dowton, and the faculty's then development officer, in 2001/2. They were created to capture the broad range of research activities within the faculty. The research profile pro forma was then devised as a promotional tool for the web. The reason the list of broad research terms is fixed is so that web users may browse without being overwhelmed by a very long list of choices. The profile form also contains a free-text specific keyword field to provide a means of faceting the broad research terms that were chosen.

Some issues:

• Keeping the list representative is an ongoing challenge and there is always a risk that it could be skewed in a specific direction through the active input of one group perhaps at the expense of less active groups.
• The other issue is the fact that some people are diligent with maintaining their profiles while others are not. The issue of representativeness may be further exacerbated, as we remove profiles that are virtually incomplete and that have not been updated in over 18 months.