FAQs and Glossary

Pure is a Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), it is a tool used by the University of Aberdeen to capture information on research publications and activity undertaken by researchers at the University. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen are expected to capture their outputs in Pure, as the content used to populate personal and institutional webpages dynamically and is used as part of the personal reporting functionality. 

We encourage all research active staff and students to use Pure to support and build their research profile. Staff and students use Pure to share research publications, blog posts, news articles, engagement activities, work presented at conferences, membership of professional bodies and other research related activity.

Information in Pure is used to showcase your research and research related activity.  At institutional level, Pure is used to enable open access and to populate the Public Research Portal and Staff pages. Pure can also be used to facilitate preparations for institutional submission to the Research Excellence Framework and forms the basis for discussions at annual research reviews.

Information that is made public can be seen by all members of the Public who visit the Research Portal or Staff Pages. Information that is restricted or confidential will only be seen by those named on the individual records.

To help and support you in the use of Pure several administrative staff in the Research and innovation and Scholarly communications teams have access to your data in Pure.  Your Head of School and Director of Research are also able to see the information you have added to Pure.

All research content can be added to Pure, it is not restricted to just your time at Aberdeen. Research publications can be imported from a variety of electronic import sources or added manually. See our guide for more information.

For newly accepted publications we encourage all staff and students to contact paperaccepted@abdn.ac.uk, our central team will help you to add all the required information and to comply with any open access requirements.

Information on the latest open access requirements can be found on our Library pages, find out more here.

Yes, you can add your research data to Pure, however most research data is usually shared with a funder or added to dedicated national or subject repositories. Pure is most frequently used as a data catalogue, a way of sharing links to all your data in one place. You can find a list of data repositories here, however if you would like to store your research data in Pure please email opendata@abdn.ac.uk

AURA is a repository of all full text free to read publications, it is a dedicated space for content that has been made open access. When you add open access content to Pure, the full text files and the publication metadata are sent to AURA.

Content in Pure will default to backend or to Public, depending on its type. You can change the visibility setting on each individual content item in Pure, this gives you control over what you do and don’t want to share on the Research Portal and on Staff pages. You can also update the visibility of your whole profile. To share your publications on staff pages, and your content on the Research Portal you will need to set your profile to public. More information can be found in this guide.  A guide to updating your whole profile can be found here

Yes, using Pure you can highlight content for the Public Research Portal, please see our user guide on how to highlight content.

If you are having any issues with the display of content in Pure, please email pure-feedback@abdn.ac.uk

Information added to Pure is fed to the Public Research Portal and Staff pages. If your Pure profile is not public this will stop content going to those sites. There are also settings on staff pages that need to be upated to allow content to be colelcted from Pure. On your staff page check that you have ticked the box to display publications from Pure. Use the guide below to update your profile and settings on your staff page.

Making your profile public

If your visiblity settings are public and you have set up the your staff page to display content but your publications are still not showing, please email pure-feedback@abdn.ac.uk

You can download publications in RIS or BibTeX format to take to another institution, or you can link Pure to your ORCID account and easily transfer your research content from Pure to ORCID and then share it with your new institution. Email pure-feedback@abdn.ac.uk if you need help downloading publication infomrmaiton, or visit this page to see how to connect Pure to ORCID.

Once a person leaves the university, they will no longer have access to their Pure account, and the specific profile page on the Research portal will no longer display, however Publications and activities that were added to Pure will remain accessible and any permanent identifiers such as DOIs and handles created through Pure will still work.