Elements integrates with other databases to pull details of your published publications into your Elements account, so you can claim and manage existing publications. You should add details of new publications/outputs as soon as possible after acceptance and deposit the records along with your accepted manuscript to SRO. Elements will not harvest publication information until the work has been published, so it is important to create and deposit records for newly accepted publications yourself.
Item types
Elements supports the capture of information for a range of item types. See details of the different item types in the following tabs.
An article in a journal, magazine, newspaper. Not necessarily peer-reviewed. May be an electronic-only medium, such as an online journal or news website.
Journal articles are subject to the REF Open Access policy, and so must be deposited from Elements to SRO within 3 months of the acceptance date, along with the Author Accepted Manuscript.
You may feel that non-traditional articles, such as newspaper articles, are better suited to the item type 'Other' as this type has less mandatory fields (e.g. Accepted Date, which may not apply to a newspaper article).
Physical objects, for example an art, sound or poster installation.
Online-only articles that are not published in a traditional journal.
There are three item types to represent your contribution to a published book:
Book
The Book item type represents your authoring of an entire book.
Chapter
The Chapter item type represents a chapter you authored in an edited book.
Edited Book
The Edited Book item type represents your contribution as editor of a book.
If you were the editor of a book and authored a chapter in that book, you should create two records; one Edited Book record and one Chapter record.
Musical compositions.
A published conference paper. Can be used for conference papers published in journals, books or proceedings.
Conference Proceedings are subject to the REF Open Access policy, so must be deposited from Elements to SRO, along with the Author Accepted Manuscript, within 3 months of the acceptance date.
Conference abstracts should be added under Presentation.
Conference posters should be added under Poster.
If you have data to deposit (e.g. files, images etc.) please do this directly in Sussex Figshare.
Use Elements to create Dataset records for data which is held elsewhere (e.g. Zenodo).
The Edited Special Journal Issue item type should be used to represent your editing of a journal issue as a Guest Editor.
If you also authored an article or articles in the issue, these should be added under Article.
A digital photograph or visual image.
A show or exhibition of artwork should be added under Show/Exhibition.
Videos and films should be added to Elements under the Media item type.
Audio and video outputs.
Something within the scope of the repository, but not covered by the other categories.
Upon review, if we think your output does fit under a more descriptive item type, we will update the record.
A published patent. Do not include as yet unpublished patent applications.
All kinds of performances, for example, a play or dance or music performances.
Posters presented or shown at a conference.
A preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available freely, before or after a paper is published in a journal.
At the moment, preprint records should not be deposited from Elements to SRO.
Preprint records are welcome in Elements, and will show up on your staff profile without being deposited to SRO.
You can link Preprint records to their correspoding publication record in Elements by navigating to the specific record page, and clicking CREATE NEW in the Relationships section and then Publication, as shown below.
A paper, speech, lecture or presentation given at a conference, workshop or other event. If the conference item has been published in a journal or book then use 'Conference Proceedings' instead.
Conference abstracts should be added to Elements as a Presentation.
A monograph. This may be a technical report, project report, documentation, manual, working paper or discussion paper.
An artist's exhibition or site specific performance-based deposit.
Records representing software/code without the software/code attached should be created in Elements.
If you want to create a software/code record with the software/code attached, please submit this directly into Sussex Figshare.
A thesis or dissertation.
PhD theses completed at the University of Sussex should be added to the repository via the Research Student Administration Office. See their website for information.
Below are short videos that will show you how to use Elements to create, deposit and manage your publications. Click the 'More information' tab next to each video for further details.
Jump to:
Deposit an accepted publication from Elements to SRO
Deposit a claimed publication from Elements to SRO
See which publications need to be deposited
Manage your research identifiers (e.g. ORCiD, Scopus ID)
Move a publication to the top of your publications list
Hide a publication from your profile
For information that isn't covered in the videos below, see our Further Information page.
Accepted publications
You should create a manual record for publications which have been accepted for publication, and deposit the record to SRO within 3 months of the acceptance date to satisfy REF and funder Open Access policies.
This is especially important for article and conference proceeding records, which should be deposited to SRO with the author accepted manuscript (the version post-peer review but prior to any copyediting or layout work).
If you are updating your profile to include older material that has already been published, it is unlikley that you will need to create a manual record unless it's a publication type that is not included in the data sources Elements searches, for exmaple a newspaper article, a blog post, an exhibition or performance, or an article from a journal that is not widely indexed. If you are not sure if you should add a manual record, please contact the SRO team at sro@sussex.ac.uk.
Attaching a manuscript to your record
We recommend you upload the author's accepted manuscript (or 'AAM'; sometimes referred to as a 'postprint') with your record. This is the version after peer-review but before any layout or copyediting work is completed by the publisher. Most publishers allow this version to be uploaded to an institutional repository, often with an embargo period. With a few exceptions, publishers do not allow the use of the final published version, unless Gold Open Access has been paid for.
The AAM is the version required as a minimum to fulfil a number of funder Open Access requirements. The document should be free from comments, highlighting or tracked changes. You can deposit the AAM in Word or PDF format.
For more information, see the Claiming records & pending publications section.
Depositing claimed records
All records should be deposited from Elements to SRO (except preprint records) after they have been created or claimed. Once you have claimed a record, please deposit it to SRO with the accepted manuscript attached (this is the version after peer review but prior to any copyediting or layout work being completed by the publisher).
If you have a large number of older publications which haven't been deposited to SRO, please contact sro@sussex.ac.uk so we can advise if all of the records should be deposited.
Harvesting
Elements will locate your already published publications on external databases using various identifiers. Elements will pull publication details into your pending publications list, where you can claim or reject them as required. It's important that you check and modify your identifier settings before you begin adding publications as this will give Elements the best chance of identifying your publications correctly and minimise the need to manually add records for already published works. See 'Managing your research identifiers' below.
Elements is not able to retrieve details of publications which have just been accepted and not yet published. Accepted papers should be added to Elements manually - see the Accepted publications section above.
Pending publications
Elements locates your publications on external data sources using your identifiers. The more information you add to the identifiers section of Elements, the more accurate Elements' search will be.
If Elements is certain you have authored a publication, it will automatically claim it for you, and the record will appear in your claimed records list. This will happen if, for example, the publication is linked to your Scopus ID, ResearchID or ORCiD.
If Elements isn't sure you authored the publication, it will appear in your pending list. You should check your pending list periodically and claim or reject the publications there as appropriate.
You can claim or reject publications by clicking the blue REJECT or CLAIM buttons on each record in the list, or by selecting multiple records using the checkboxes.
If no items show in your pending publications and you think there should be records there, please check and modify your identifier settings. (See 'Managing your research identifiers' below.)
If some publications are still not showing, you may need to add them manually as they might not be on external data sources, and therefore Elements will not harvest them.
If you have numerous pending publications which are not yours, you should check your identifier settings, and add or modify settings to improve the suggestions in pending. This is particularly important if you have a common name. (See 'Managing your research identifiers' below.)
Automatic claiming
You can change your settings to enable Elements to auto-claim publications that meet certain criteria. This can save you time, but we recommend you consider the reliability of the criteria you use. A unique identifier such as ORCID will correctly claim your work, while setting up an auto-claim for your name could lead to incorrect claiming of work by authors with the same name.
For more information, see the Claiming records & pending publications section.
See which publications need to be deposited
Publications published before 01 January 2020 do not need to be deposited from Elements to SRO. However, if you would like a pre-2020 publication to have a complete metadata record in the repository, and/or have a PDF attached, please do go ahead and deposit it to SRO.
To see which of your records need to be deposited to SRO, follow the steps below:
1. Log into Elements
2. Click Publications
3. Scroll down the filters on the right side of the screen. Select 'Awaiting deposit' from the Repository status dropdown
Please note that Preprint records are welcome in Elements, but should not currently be deposited to SRO.
For more information on depositing publications, see the Depositing publications section.
You can change your settings to enable Elements to auto-claim publications that meet certain criteria.
This can save you time, but we recommend you consider the reliability of the criteria you use. A unique identifier such as ORCID will correctly claim your work, while setting up an auto-claim for your name could lead to incorrect claiming of work by authors with the same name.
You can amend how Elements performs name-based searches for you; if you publish under more than one name/name variation, you can make sure Elements searches for them all. Items located through a name based search will be placed in your pending publications list, for you to claim or reject. The default name-based searches have been set up as 'Family name, First name' and 'Family name, Initials'. If you only ever publish with your full name and are being offered too many publications that are not yours, remove the broader option. You can also narrow the results returned by name-based searches by including additional information, such as addresses.
To modify your settings click on Menu > My Profile > Settings> Name-Based Search. Use the green plus icon to add a new name variant and save changes. Note that you'll need to select Run searches in order for the changes to have an effect on the search results.
ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an international standard to help researchers to establish and maintain their scholarly identity. It aims to solve common issues such as
-not getting credit for your research because your name is common or because you have published using a different version of your name
-struggling to find a central place to keep track of all your research outputs
-having to spend time entering the same information over and over in publisher and grant submission systems
ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. To register for an ORCID iD, go to orcid.org and fill in the online registration form.
Your University Elements profile can be linked to your ORCiD record. This will enable Elements to retrieve publication IDs from your ORCiD profile and use these IDs to find those publications online and claim those records for you automatically and, in addition, details of records deposited into Elements will automatically update your ORCiD record.
To connect your ORCiD account to your Elements profile, select the option Menu> My Profile> Settings> ORCID Settings from the top left hand menu.
Throughout your publishing career you may have created or been given one or more unique author identifiers. These distinct codes help avoid the problems that can come from publishing under different name variants and different authors having the same name. Elements integrates with ResearcherID (Web of Science) and Scopus IDs; if your work is included on these databases you are likely to have a corresponding identifier. Elements also integrates with ORCID, this is a unique identifier that is not affiliated with any particular database and can be used across a number of different research systems.
To add a unique identifier, click on Menu > My Profile > Settings > Automatic Claiming. Under 'Add external profiles', you will be given the option to add in your identifiers. Note that you will need to select Run searches for the changes to have an effect on the search results.
For each individual identifier, select the 'manage' button to change the settings for that identifier.
Move a publication to the top of your staff profile publications list
Elements places publications on your staff profile in order of their published dates; if your publication is not yet published and so doesn't yet have a publication date, it will sit at the end of your publication list.
You can move publications to the top of your list by logging into Elements, navigating to your publications list and clicking the heart icon on records you wish to highlight.
We monitor all records that have not yet been published and endeavour to add the published details as soon as possible after publication. If you know your paper has been published and the record has not yet been updated, please do let us know and we'll get the information added right away.
Hide a publication from your profile/make a publication private
To hide a publication from your profile, navigate to the Publications section of your Elements account, locate the publication you want to hide and click the globe icon. You will then be able to select the desired privacy settings for that publication.