In this blog, we’d like to tell you about some of the changes that we’ve worked on in the past months.

In many cases, the results you find in Global Campus are just a starting point for a process that users do together with colleagues. To facilitate sharing insights with colleagues, you can now share collections with other users in your organization, and with groups of users that we call Teams. API users can also create a new search that is by default shared with a team, and local administrators can manage who belongs to which team.

The most noticeable change for users will be that the sidebar now has collapsible groups for the various filters. We felt this change was needed, because we wanted room for more filters without making the interface a mess. The extra filters that ship with this update are related to seniority: you can now better find early career researchers by filtering on the years since their first publication and, if you have the h-index information enabled, you can also filter on it. Other improvements to filters: the Countries filter for affiliation now contains several groups of countries (such as EU).

As we’re able to help more and more organisations with smart search through Global Campus, we also needed more ways of authenticating and authorizing users. To make sure we could handle all of these future ways into the application, we have upgraded the entrance to Global Campus. Individual users can now already link their account to their ORCID, and then use that ORCID to login at Global Campus. One password fewer to remember, and a starting point for more exciting integrations in the future!

At Global Campus, we believe that not everything in academia has to look like a spreadsheet. It means we spend a significant part of our efforts on building a user interface that is easy to work with. In this update, we have included a UI Framework (Vuetify) that will help us standardize a lot of elements in our interface going forward. The changes are still relatively minor, and will take a trained eye to notice, but we believe the UI framework will help us in keeping the interface recognizable and snappy going forward.

Not all of the development efforts are visible on the outside. One of the major projects involved standardization of our automated tests. The automated tests are there to ensure that updates to the application do not break existing functionality, and increasing the standardization of those tests helps to make the application more robust as we build new exciting features.