Elements at Virginia Tech: Elements Introduction

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Elements helps you gather, manage, and share details of your scholarly activity

Virginia Tech's instance of Elements (produced by Symplectic) collects and manages information about research and scholarship, creative works, teaching, extension, outreach, and service activities. This system automates data collection from within and outside the university while also allowing you to manually enter data. 

The data in Elements is then available for reporting and sharing.

• Combines with university data sources to feed the University Data Commons (UDC), allowing automated production of: annual electronic faculty activity reports (efars); promotion and tenure dossiers; and individual, department, college, and university level reports -- all of which can be further edited and customized by users once produced. 
• Easily share select information to display publicly on Virginia Tech Experts, a searchable, public profile system.

Activities in Elements are organized in modules, shown in the image below. 

Data is automatically added from both internal and external sources, or it can be added manually. 

• Internal data primarily feeds the Grants, Professional Activities, and Teaching Activities modules. These include Banner, University Data Commons, Summit (OSP data), Enterprise systems (course data), and more.
• External systems are primarily feeding the Scholarly & Creative Works modules. These include ORCID, Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, arXiv, figshare, SSRN, and more.
• Manual submission is possible in all of the modules. Although some data can only be added manually, usually it is preferred or required to use data from outside sources (see above 2 bullet points). 

The system also enables deposit and claiming of scholarly works in the VTechWorks institutional repository.