The basics
When creating a report, start by giving it a meaningful title and description. This report is just for you, so name it anything you want, but we recommend using something that makes it easy to distinguish from other reports in your dashboard once you’ve built a few of them.
Choosing your focus
Before you start defining the rules for your report, one of the most important steps is choosing the report’s focus, which is the main piece of information it should be centered on.
- If you’re mainly interested in information about a person (things like name and contact information, titles or departments), choose People. When your report is created, it will contain one row for each person who matches the rules you define.
- If you’re interested in a specific collection of someone’s work or accomplishments (like publications, patents or board certifications), choose that as your focus. When your report is created, it will contain one row per item, per profile, that matches the rules you define. For example, if your report’s focus is Research Grants:
- If a profile has three grants matching your rules, your report will contain three rows corresponding to that profile—one for each grant.
- If a profile has 17 matching grants, it will produce 17 rows in your report.
- A profile with no grants (or none matching your rules) will not be included in the report.
Defining your rules
Now that you’ve chosen the focus of your report, it’s time to define the rules that determine who and what should be included in the results. Rules are the building blocks of your report, and although there are many different types of rules you can use, they boil down to one simple idea: if a record matches your rules, it will be included in your report. If not, it won’t.
Depending on your focus, there will be one or two groups of rules you can define: profile rules and focus-specific rules.
Profile rules
These rules determine who should be considered for your report, and center on the details of a profile itself—name, title, departmental affiliation, date of last profile update, etc. You can define as many rules as needed to drill down to the specific population you’re interested in.
Profile rules can be defined on any report, regardless of its focus.
Focus-specific rules
If you’ve chosen a focus other than People for your report (Research Grants, for example), you’ll also see a place to define rules specific to that collection of data. Using Research Grants as our example, you might create rules based on a grant’s title, current status, starting and ending dates, or the person’s role. For a Publications focus, you might create rules based on an article’s publication date, journal name, keywords or number of citations.
Rule groups
You can also create groups of rules. When creating a rule group, you can decide if any or all of its inner rules must apply:
- Any: a record only needs to match one of the group’s rules to be included in the report.
- All: a record must match every rule in the group to be included in the report.
You can even create groups within groups, so your report can support even the most complex criteria.
Saving and running your report
Once you’ve configured your report, save it. The first time you save your report, it will be run automatically and take you directly to the results view once finished.
Note: a full report may take a few minutes to complete, depending on the rules you’ve defined and how many people are using the system. You don’t have to stay on the page—your report will continue running if you go to another page or close your browser.
