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Symplectic Elements is the University's research information management system, and provides a closed environment within which Cambridge researchers can create a profile and share information within the University of Cambridge community. 

Your Elements account

Login here (Raven login required - you can access your account from anywhere).

If this is the first time you have tried to access Elements, or if you have logged in successfully in the past, but can't now, please visit the Research Information Office Permission denied website for further guidance. You can also contact the Research Information team.

Once logged on, you can go to the Help tab and download the quick start guide, the guide to exporting and importing publications, and the troubleshooting guide for search settings, to get you started.

How Elements can help you manage your research outputs

You can use Elements to help you maintain an up-to-date publications list:

  • Set up search criteria to find your papers on databases including Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus, which are automatically searched for new papers.
  • An e-mail is generated whenever a new publication is found.
  • You accept or reject the inclusion of the new publication in your list.
  • You can add papers manually before they reach these databases.
  • Once claimed, a paper is counted as a research output, and added to the citation counts which are kept up to date automatically.

Please contact us if you need any help managing your Elements account.

You can add many more research output types than just journal articles to your Elements account:

  • Books
  • Chapters
  • Datasets
  • Conferences
  • Patents
  • Reports
  • Software / Code
  • Exhibitions
  • Internet publications
  • Scholarly editions
  • Posters
  • Theses / Dissertations
  • Working papers
  • Figures
  • Filesets
  • Media
  • Presentations
  • Prizes and awards
  • Teaching responsibilities

You can connect your ORCiD account to your Elements account

Connect to your ORCiD account and to a variety of other sources including arXiv and other profile tools such as Scopus Author ID and ResearcherID to draw in relevant information. Instructions for how to do this are provided on the Research Information Office SharePoint site.

Use Elements to populate a Publications list in your department web profile

All graduate students and research/teaching staff at the Department of Chemistry have their own profiles on the department website. When you logon to edit your website profile page you should see the following:

Screenshot showing how to enable Symplectic on your department web profile

There is a little box that says “Enable Symplectic Elements feed”, and this box must be ticked in order for the Elements feed to be initiated. This allows you to display a list of Publications that is populated automatically with your publications from Elements after you have claimed them there.

Deposit your papers and data via Elements to make them open access

Researchers should upload their papers and data via their Elements account. Instructions for how to do this are provided on the Research Information Office SharePoint site.

Altmetric data

You can also view altmetric data for your research outputs from Elements.

Funder information

Elements can also help you manage your funder information and links with Researchfish

Dimensions for Universities is a web-based tool, partly integrated with Elements, which is designed to help universities and academics to analyse and understand the funding landscape. Collecting, de-duplicating, disambiguating and categorising (publicly accessible) grant data from a growing list of funding bodies including RCUK and major charities, Dimensions provides a range of both simple and advanced search options, including a semantic search based on an abstract or other paragraph of text, to help academics to find others in their field; an institution to compare itself to another, or a department to respond to a query about past or present funding in particular areas.

Find out more

Comprehensive information and support on Elements, Researchfish, and Dimensions is provided on the University's Research Information website and their SharePoint site.