Research Guides: Elements at Virginia Tech: Add Scholarly & Creative Work

Add Scholarly and Creative Works in Elements

There are 2 actions you should take before you manually add any works: name-based search settings and automatic claiming. These steps will help automate the process of adding publications to your profile and ensure accurate information.

It is also possible to import records from a bibliographic file (RIS or BibTeX that you can export from reference managers, scholarly databases, and Google Scholar Profiles).

Elements also allows you to easily connect with VTechWorks, and deposit an appropriate version of your work. We recommend completing this step to boost the visibility of your scholarship.

Navigation on Page

Should Do (in order listed):

May Need:

Name-based search settings ►

The Elements system searches online databases including Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, MLA, ArXiv, SSRN, DBLP, and RePEc, as well as VTechWorks for publications that belong to you. It searches using variations of your name, which is why updating name-based search settings are important for accurate identification of your scholarly works. These settings help to ensure the most accurate possible identification of your scholarly and creative works by searching for your name variations and affiliations (by state and country).

Follow the instructions below to review and update your name-based search settings in Elements.

Automatic Claiming ►

When you set up automatic claiming with your ORCID, ResearcherID, Scopus ID, or other unique author identifiers, the publications or works associated with those identifiers will automatically be claimed for you in Elements. Otherwise, you must review and accept or reject each publication.

To set up automatic claiming for your researcher identifiers across databases and ORCID follow the steps below:

For reference, below are screenshots of profiles in several systems, with the individual ID location highlighted by an orange box.

screenshots highlighting where IDs are located in different systems

(If necessary), find your Scopus ID and add it to Elements ►

To find your Scopus ID, go to http://scopus.com/

Select 'Author Search' in the top right corner
Type in your Last Name, First Name, and Affiliation (if your name is common; otherwise leave blank. Be sure to use an affiliation under which you've published)
Select 'Search'
Select the correct author name from the list. If there is more than one that could be yours, verify that the publications listed are yours first (open up the author pages in a new window or tab). Once you know they are yours, you can select them all and select 'Request to merge authors.'
Open the author profile page(s) and find the author identifier, which is listed beneath the author name:
Go back Elements and select 'Dimensions Researcher ID from the list of 'Add external profiles.' Paste the identifier and select 'Search.'
A list of some of the publications will be shown for you to verify that the identifier is yours. If it looks correct, select 'Next'
Leave the default option selected, 'Auto claim associated items' and select 'Confirm.'

(If necessary), find your Dimensions Researcher ID and add it to Elements ►

To find your Dimensions Researcher ID(s), go to https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication

Select the 'Researchers' filter option, select "More" below the last researcher listed, and a search box will appear; then type your name in the search box. Hit enter. Options will display with various affiliations; select the correct one.
Select "Limit to" at the bottom of the search filters. You will now be on your Dimensions Researcher Profile/Identifier page.
Copy the end of the URL starting with 'ur.' to get your Dimensions Researcher ID. For example, this profile's URL is https://app.dimensions.ai/discover/publication?or_facet_researcher=ur.015150374033.97, and the identifier is "ur.015150374033.97"
Go back Elements and select 'Dimensions Researcher ID from the list of 'Add external profiles.' Paste the identifier and select 'Search.'
A list of some of the publications will be shown for you to verify that the identifier is yours. If it looks correct, select 'Next'
Leave the default option selected, 'Auto claim associated items' and select 'Confirm.'

Review your scholarly & creative works ►

After reviewing and editing your name-based search settings and automatic claiming you are likely to have some works to review and either reject or claim. Note that some publications may have already been accepted on your behalf by staff in the library or the provost's office. You should review accepted publications for accuracy.

Add scholarly & creative works manually to Elements ►

Sometimes, it is more appropriate to manually add certain scholarly and creative works to Elements. For example, you may want to add a conference presentation, abstract, or poster. Or you may want to add a scholarly work that has been accepted but not yet published, so that it will be added to your annual faculty activity report. Note that manually adding work that will be published later will likely result in duplicate records in the future which you will need to join (see Step 6 for joining duplicates).

Virginia Tech's Open Access Policy allows you to add the Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM) to VTechWorks, the institutional repository. See this guide on how to prepare your manuscript for deposit.

If you do not have a file ready yet, you can skip this step for now and revisit it later.
You can also add PDFs and Word docs of less formal scholarly works, such as presentation slides, posters, and other projects. You can add data sets to VTechData.

Deposit your works to VTechWorks ►

You can make your scholarly and creative works openly available to the world by depositing them in VTechWorks, Virginia Tech's institutional repository. Making your work Open Access (OA) improves your visibility and can also boost your impact as a researcher.

Please note: Virginia Tech's open access policy covers accepted manuscripts for scholarly articles that are already scheduled to be published. If you are considering a patent or other invention or technology IP (intellectual property), check in with Link License Launch (LLL) and their Resources for Inventors before moving forward with any publication or release of manuscripts or data.

There are two types of works you can make OA in VTechWorks:

Works that have never been published or deposited online, such as conference presentation slides, posters, and data sets.
- Note about copyright: if you're depositing conference slides or a poster, you usually retain copyright unless they publish conference proceedings, and even then, they usually only ask you to sign over copyright to the conference paper, not the presentation. In addition, conference organizers will have to ask presenters to sign over copyright, so you should have a record of it, and they should definitely have a record of it. If you are in doubt, you can always reach out to the conference organizers to verify.
Author's Accepted Manuscripts (AAM) of published scholarly articles, such as journal articles and book chapters, which can be deposited immediately upon acceptance or publication under the Virginia Tech Open Access Policy. If your published article is not already OA, consider depositing the AAM in VTechWorks to increase its visibility and impact.

Deposit your unpublished scholarly works ►

Before you deposit (preparing your file for deposit):
1. Make it accessible.
  1. For Google Slides, you can install Grackle Accessibility Checker before you convert it to a PDF. For PowerPoint, you can check accessibility with its own checker. For other Microsoft files, please see Creating Accessible Documents with Microsoft 365 Products Accessibility Checker.
2. Provide information about the work on the first page or on a separate title page (example), so if someone lands on the PDF from a search engine, they will know what they have found and can cite it if they want, such as:
  1. Title of the work
  2. Author(s) & affiliation(s)
  3. Name of the conference, meeting, seminar, etc.
  4. Name of the society or organization hosting the conference
  5. Dates of the conference, meeting, seminar, etc.
  6. The copyright or licensing information, especially if you want to apply an open license (e.g., Creative Commons Licenses).
  7. Here's an example of conference presentation slides with necessary identifying information of the author, conference, and date.
3. Name the file something brief and relevant; use dashes or underscores in between words, such as 2022_BRIC_Presentation-Follow_the_Yellow_Brick_Road.pdf, because this will be the end of the URL on the file in VTechWorks.
Steps for depositing via Elements:

Navigate to your scholarly & creative works in Elements
If the scholarly work is already added to Elements, find the scholarly work you wish to deposit, such as the conference presentation below, and select Deposit on the right.
In the next pop-up window, select Deposit.
Choose your file and select 'Published version' from the dropdown menu.
Select 'Use this file'
You shouldn't need to select an embargo period unless the conference has a specific copyright policy.
Select a reuse license, if applicable (e.g., you may have applied a Creative Commons license so others can easily reuse your content without asking permission).
Select 'Deposit.'

Deposit your AAM of your published scholarly articles ►

You are permitted under Virginia Tech's Open Access Policy to deposit your Author's Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of your scholarly articles, such as peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters, to VTechWorks.

Before you deposit your work (preparing your file for deposit):
1. Make it accessible.
  1. In Microsoft Word, go to Review > Check Accessibility and then address any issues found. You can also deposit the Word version in addition to the PDF, which provides greater accessibility.
  2. For other Microsoft files, please see Creating Accessible Documents with Microsoft 365 Products Accessibility Checker.
2. Provide information about the work on the first page or on a separate title page (example), so if someone lands on the PDF from a search engine, they will know what they have found and can cite it if they want. It's recommended that you include:
  1. A statement on the title page that says "This is the accepted manuscript of..." followed by the full citation of the published version, including the DOI, if available.
  2. Author(s) & affiliation(s)
  3. Publication date
  4. Publisher
  5. Journal or source title
  6. The copyright or licensing information, especially if you are permitted to apply an open license (e.g., Creative Commons Licenses).
  7. If line numbers are present, remove them (in Word, go to Layout > Line numbers > None).
  8. If double spaced, consider reverting to single spaced for easier reading and fewer pages for printing.
  9. Add figures, tables, etc.
  10. If supplementary data or files were included, add a link to these if possible.
  11. Example of information included on a title page of a deposited book chapter:
    - Teaching Undergraduates to Collate and Evaluate News Sources with Altmetrics
      Chapter Three of Teaching about Fake News: Lesson Plans for Different Disciplines and Audiences
      Amanda MacDonald^a and Rachel Miles^b
      
      ^a Undergraduate Research Services Coordinator
      Virginia Tech University Libraries
      abmacdon@vt.edu
      
      ^b Research Impact Librarian
      Virginia Tech University Libraries
      ramiles@vt.edu
      
      This is the published version of: MacDonald, A. B., & Miles, R. A. (2021). Teaching Undergraduates to Collate and Evaluate News Sources with Altmetrics. In C. Benjes-Small, C. Wittig, & M. K. Oberlies (Eds.), Teaching About Fake News: Lesson Plans for Different Disciplines and Audiences (pp. 29–47). Association of College and Research Libraries. Print and eBook purchase options of the full-text book available at: https://www.alastore.ala.org/content/teaching-about-fake-news-lesson-plans-different-disciplines-andaudiences
      
      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0); please give attribution to the authors, Amanda MacDonald and Rachel Miles.
3. Name the file something brief and relevant; use dashes or underscores in between words, such as Teaching_Undergraduates_to_Evaluate_with_Altmetrics.pdf, because this will be the end of the URL on the file in VTechWorks.
Steps for depositing via Elements:
1. Navigate to your scholarly & creative works in Elements
2. If the scholarly work is already added to Elements, find it in Elements. If it says 'In OA Policy,' it means that it is covered by the OA policy and the AAM can be deposited (see screenshot below for an example).
  Note: If you want to deposit an AAM of a book chapter, Elements does not automatically identify it as 'In OA Policy,' but it is covered by the policy if it was published after July 1, 2021.
3. In the next pop-up window, select Deposit.
4. Review the institutional deposit advice.
  1. If the manuscript you want to deposit is not covered by the OA policy, review the SHERPA RoMEO advice, the publisher copyright database. Select the 'Accepted' tab to view the advice for depositing the AAM. Here's an example:
    1. In the example above, the author can deposit to the institutional repository (Option 2), which is VTechWorks, with a 12-month embargo. Remember the embargo period for the final step, if applicable.
5. Choose your file and select 'Accepted version' from the dropdown menu.
6. Select 'Use this file'
7. If necessary, select an embargo period, such as 12-months as stipulated in the SHERPA/RoMEO example above. You do not need to set an embargo period for an AAM that is covered by the OA policy (scholarly articles published after July 1, 2021, such as journal articles and book chapters).
8. Select a reuse license, if applicable and allowed by the publisher policy (e.g., you may have applied a Creative Commons license so others can easily reuse your content without asking permission). Otherwise, do not select this option.
9. Select 'Deposit.'
  
  The example above does not include an embargo or reuse license, which is the most common way to deposit an AAM of a published scholarly article in a non-OA journal or book that is covered by the OA policy.

Import a Bibliographic file ►

You may have other scholarly works that are not populated by the major researcher identifiers and databases linked in Elements. You can either add them manually (Step 4) or import them from a bibliographic file, (e.g., BibTeX or RIS file). These file types can usually be exported from reference managers, scholarly databases, and Google Scholar Profiles.

Here are (optional) steps for exporting a BibTeX file from your Google Scholar Profile, but keep in mind that Google Scholar data is low quality and sometimes inaccurate. As a result, if you decide to use a BibTeX file from your Google Scholarly Profile, you may want to import that into a reference manager first, such as Zotero or Mendeley, clean up the records, export it from the reference manager, and then import it into Elements.

Optional: Export a BibTeX file from your Google Scholar Profile ►

Go to Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/
Make sure you are logged in (navigate to the top-right corner; if you see your profile picture or avatar, then you are logged in).
Go to the menu in the top-left corner. Select 'My Profile.'
Select all your works or the ones you wish to export.
Select Export -- BibTeX
Google Scholar will ask if you want to export the selected or all of your works. Choose the desired option and select Export.
Google Scholar will take you to the text of the BibTeX, but it will not automatically save it. You will see a page like the one pictured below. Simply right click anywhere on the page, select Save as...
Save the file somewhere easy to remember. You can leave the default settings; it automatically saves it as a TXT file.
Optionally, from there, you can import the TXT file (which is also a BibTeX file) into a reference manager, clean up the records, and then export it from the reference manager before importing it into Elements.

To import an RIS or BibTeX file to Elements:

Go to Menu--Tools--Import Scholarly & Creative Works
Choose your BibTeX or RIS file
Select the corresponding radio button (RIS or BibTeX).
Select 'Upload.'
They system may identify some or all of the records from your file as duplicates. If that is the case, go through the list, and you can either "supplement existing," "import as new," or "Just add the link," as in the link to the record from your file. Leave the "Author" relationship selected unless your relationship with the record is different, such as an editor:
If the system identifies some of your records as new and they turn out to be duplicates, you can go back and join the records later (Step 6).
Select 'Import.'

Edit/Fix Scholarly & Creative Work Entries ►

Next you'll want to navigate to your scholarly and creative works page to make any edits to your works or to add new works manually. If you're already on that page, you can skip 'Correct the Work Type,' just below it.

Navigate to your Scholarly & Creative Works Page ►

Click on Menu in the top left corner.
Select Scholarly & Creative Works under My Profile - My Work
The screen will display a listing of all of your current scholarly & creative works in Elements.
You can also select how many works to view on one page (up to 100), sort them, filter by work type, date, relationship, and title; and choose which aspect to focus on:

If there is an error with one of the references listed, you can correct it by following the instructions below.

Correct the Work Type

Make sure the work is correctly categorized. Categorizing the correct type of work will enable the correct fields for the work, which is important to complete first for editing and correcting scholarly works.

If the type is incorrect, click the pencil next to the current type.
Select the correct work type from the popup menu.

Correct and/or add fields within the record

When/if the reference is correctly categorized, click the title of the work to view the full record.
Scroll down to the Data Sources and choose pencil edit icon on the right.
Edit the necessary fields. Make sure to fill required fields marked with a red * (Asterisks). Click the ? icon to learn more about the field.
Finally, when all information has been updated, click the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

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