What is Proactive Search?

Proactive Search is designed to enhance your faculty's experience by automatically looking up publications ahead of time from Crossref, so they don't have to manually search for them. The only step for them is to review the publication before they accept it into their faculty profile within Faculty Success. This feature aims to save them time and streamline their data entry process.

The Publication Proactive Search aims to automate the retrieval of scholarly outputs instead of relying on manual entry. The feature matches publications in the Crossref database to author name using fuzzy matching—ignoring spaces, hyphens, and other non-alphabetical characters. Publications are not automatically added to your record; instead, you will be prompted to reject or edit and add individual publications.

How to Access Proactive Search

From the Activities screen, you will see Notifications in a left-hand column; new publications are listed as To Do until you review them. Notifications can safely be ignored if you do not wish to make use of this feature.

You may wonder how Publication Proactive Search differs from the Import function within Intellectual Contributions/Publications. The former is intended to be a timely and partially automated process that works without your initiating an import. Existing Import functions will continue to be supported, and as with the CrossRef, PubMed, and Web of Science Import features, duplicate publications are detected based on matching digital object identifier (DOI). As with existing Import functions, you will be able to review duplicates side-by-side and add the duplicate result as a new record, merge the records, or reject the imported record.

How to Get Help

Technical assistance is available through the Illinois State University Technology Support Center at:

• Phone: (309) 438-4357
• Email: SupportCenter@IllinoisState.edu
• Submit a Request via Web Form: Help.IllinoisState.edu/get-it-help
• Live Chat: Help.IllinoisState.edu/get-it-help