Finding a Research Collaborator

If you are a faculty member, administrator or staff looking for a research partner on a paper, grant or other activity with an FIU colleague, there are various steps you can take using SCHOLARS@FIU.EDU.

• When looking for expertise -- especially outside your field -- it helps to consider various key words or subject terms that might not exist in your own field, before starting a search; and synonyms can drive different search results. For example, a search for hurricanes and another for cyclones.


• An example "drill-down" search: Starting with the term "hurricanes," a faceted search box titled "Limit display by"will appear to the top-right on your hits page. Here, it is possible to limit by "people," "organizations" or "research." If you choose the "research" link, you will be taken to another page showing over 500 article citations and over 50 grants recorded in SCHOLARS@FIU, alongside other forms of research, including books and conference presentations. You can drill down further. If selecting the "grants" link, different grants awarded to FIU faculty will be listed, including one titled "Mechanisms for Hurricane Motion and Intensity Change," from the National Science Foundation (NSF), with Willoughby, Hugh E. as Principal Investigator from 2017 - 2020. Scrolling down and clicking on his name will take you to his profile and contact information. If you locate any profile that does not yet have contact information, check at https://phonebook.fiu.edu for additional information.


• When searching a subject, SCHOLARS@FIU.EDU is designed to list people, their photos and professional directory information first. However, beneath the list of people with expertise, sometimes, when scrolling down, citations can appear for FIU research not yet linked to a person. In the near future, we will be establishing ways to link these records with the faculty member who wrote the article).


• When searching for a person's name, start with their last name only, or their full first and last name: e.g. enter either Furton or Kenneth Furton -- and *not* an abbreviated name such as "Ken Furton."


• If you are unsure of the correct spelling, put ~ at the end of your search term -- e.g., stolsenburg~ finds Stolzenberg, Lisa (as well her articles on domestic crime and influencing factors).


• The directory information listed for people in SCHOLARS@FIU will, in the future, contain links directly to the web pages of the person held at their respective colleges, schools or departments. In the meantime, if the web page link does not work, a quick Google search can lead to the department web page.


• Generally speaking, keep it simple! Use short, single terms unless your searches are returning too many results.


• Use quotes to search for an entire phrase -- e.g., "remote sensing".


• Except for boolean operators, searches are not case-sensitive, so "Everglades" and "everglades" are equivalent