Learn how to search and explore Research@Oxford

Research@Oxford offers you two search options

• Free text search, or
• Tag based search

Search by free text

Your default option is to search Research@Oxford by free text. Type a name or keyword into the search bar and click the return key or click enter on your keyboard.

For searches containing more than one word, Research@Oxford will treat each word separately. For example, a search for ‘Art History’ will return researchers with matches to ‘Art’ or ‘History’ or both.

For a free text search, researchers  are returned by 'relevance' using an algorithm based on matching your search term and the frequency of its occurrence. For details, see Elements data used by Research@Oxford 

Search by tag

Searching by a tag will return a list of staff who tagged their Elements profile with a matching Field of Research label only.

For example, a search of Research@Oxford using the tag ‘Art History’ will return only those researchers who tagged their Elements profile with the ‘Art History’ Field of Research.

To switch to tag based searching, click on the slider option on the right hand side of the search bar and click on ‘Tag based search’.

Begin typing your search term. If the characters in your term match one or more Field of Research labels, you will see them presented in a drop down menu below the search bar. Click on the Field of Research you want to use for your search.
 

When Research@Oxford finds a match to your search term(s) it returns a list of researchers that you can sort alphabetically by last name (A-Z or Z-A)

You then have the option to refine the list of researchers by applying filters in the left sidebar. 

For example, you can refine the list of researchers by the department they are affiliated to

• Include or exclude researchers not affiliated to any department
• View researchers from one department by hovering on the name of a department and clicking on ‘only’
• View researchers from multiple departments by ticking the check boxes of relevant departments
• Where more than 10 departments are listed in the filter click ‘Show all’ to have the option to untick all departments and tick the check boxes of those you want to include in the search results list

Which filters you see depends on the search results. For example, if no researchers listed added a geographic focus label to their Elements profile then filtering by Geographic Focus will not be an option.

For researchers with Oxford co-authors you can view an interactive collaboration network diagram.

To open the diagram click on the link to view network on the search results page or the researchers profile.

In the network diagram, ‘collaboration’ is a proxy for co-author. Each node (circle) represents a researcher and its colour denotes the department the researcher is affiliated to. The link between two nodes represents a direct collaboration; the shorter the length, the greater the number of collaborations between them.

You can hover and click on a node to show further information about a researcher and open their profile.

The diagram allows you to switch between 3 different node sizes for

• Collaborations: the size of each node represents the number of collaborations a person shares with other people in the diagram
• Research Outputs: the size of each node represents the total number of research outputs that person is associated with
• Separation: the size of each node represents how many degrees of separation a person is from the subject of the network

You also have the option to switch to an extended network that includes all the researchers who author with the researcher's co-authors.