Helsinki University Library plays a central role in the University’s knowledge production, in validating publication information, and in linking research outputs with the University’s key systems and processes.
The production of publication information is the most tangible and visible part of this work. The Library manages community members’ publication records in the research information system Tuhat. Under its service pledge, it imports publication data from leading international citation databases on behalf of researchers, systematically extracting and transferring records from Scopus and Web of Science into the University’s system.
The University’s Institutional Research and Analysis team manages annual reporting and works with the Library and the IT Centre to deliver reporting services. Individual units, including faculties, retain responsibility for their own reporting. The Library’s involvement is limited: not all publication information for community members is imported automatically into the research information system, as comprehensive sources are not always available, so researchers themselves must enter certain records. At the University level, the Library imports around half of all publications, with researchers responsible for the remainder. The proportion varies considerably across academic disciplines. Annual reporting at the University covers the recording of individual staff members’ disciplines in Tuhat, along with teacher and researcher visits.
For decades now, the Library has promoted open access to research articles. Researchers can supplement publication information in Tuhat by uploading the full text of their articles or can provide the manuscript to the Library’s Open Access team to make it freely available in the publication repository Helda.
The Library’s work underpins all other activities, as research visibility and reporting depend on reliable and comprehensive publication information. Publication records for individual researchers are available in the University of Helsinki Research Portal, while units can extract lists and summaries to support their presentations. Publication information is also available in the Research.fi portal.
The Library focuses on validating publication information, through ensuring publications are correctly identified, linked to the right people and units, and easily findable. Researchers are responsible for verifying that their own records appear correctly in the system.
The research information system provides data for a wide range of publication analyses concerning the University’s units and staff. These analyses are often based on publication lists obtained from the system, from which the Library team extracts DOI identifiers. These in turn make it possible to locate publications in bibliometric databases and analyse their citation impact, topics and international reach.
For example, examining the citation impact of publications at the faculty or other sub-University level requires information from the research information system on what the specific unit has published. For the City Centre Campus, Tuhat is the only comprehensive source of faculty publications.
In addition to its core work, the Library explores innovative ways to raise the visibility of the University’s research. The University’s research information system contains data on publications, infrastructure and projects, and provides a platform for experimenting with new ways of collecting, linking and using information. While information collection initially focused on publication records, which remain central to reporting and management, it has gradually expanded to cover other entities.
Research project information, whose lifecycle management has been developed through the MyResearch initiative, has assumed a key role due to the University’s changing operating logic. Project information is now needed early on at the planning stage to support financial, agreement and risk management as well as ethics review, both within individual projects and across the organisation. Keeping research-unit information up to date in the system is also important, as it appears in researcher profiles and personal information pages on the helsinki.fi website.
This ensures that publication records in the research information system link the University’s research with reporting and researcher visibility. When properly produced and validated, this information serves multiple purposes: it supports researcher visibility, University-level monitoring, and the generation of a wide range of knowledge and metrics. It is also shared externally, appearing in national research repositories accessible to funders, assessors and collaborators, which reinforces the University’s position in rankings and evaluations.
Through publication records and the research information system, the Library connects to research assessment and visibility as well as their long-term development. Its work with research-based knowledge forms part of the University’s core operations.
Text: Veera Ristikartano
This text draws on interviews with Pekka Karhula and Janne Rantanen, specialists in the Library’s publication-information production, and project manager Aija Kaitera of the MyResearch service, as well as on the expertise of information specialists Terhi Sandgren and Markku Roinila.