Research Assessment

Symplectic Elements enables you to collect, collate, and assess research inputs, outputs, outcomes, and professional activities in a single, integrated system.

Whether you are running faculty annual reviews, preparing for national assessments, or tracking strategic goals, our flexible workflows reduce administrative burden, improve data quality, and give you the insight needed to drive better decisions.

Reduce the burden of compliance

Government and funding bodies around the world mandate reporting on research quality, impact, and open access policy compliance. We know how much time and effort this can take – so we’ve built tools to make it easier.

By reusing the rich data already captured in Symplectic Elements and integrating with the widest range of external sources in the industry, you can eliminate manual re-keying and spreadsheets, cut down on duplication, and focus on strategic insight.

Our automated data harvesting pulls metrics and metadata from Dimensions, Web of Science, Scopus, Europe PMC, Altmetric, and more – helping you make informed quality judgments and prepare high-quality submissions with minimal effort.

Flexible workflows for every review type

Our configurable modules support both person-level and item-level evaluations, enabling structured assessment of researchers, publications, impact case studies, and other research outcomes. You can design simple one-step submissions or complex, multi-stage assessments: from collecting outputs and narratives to assigning reviewers, capturing scores and comments, and final manager sign-off.

Use it for a wide variety of scenarios, including:

Academic activity reviews (annual review, promotion, tenure)
Peer review of publications and outputs
Impact case study evaluation (for REF or public showcase)
Accreditation and benchmarking exercises
Internal benchmarking and preparation for REF, ERA, or PBRF
Annual collection of research outputs against quality thresholds

National Assessments

We offer specific functionality for national assessments, including the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK and the Performance-based Research Fund (PBRF) in New Zealand.

As assessment frameworks evolve – including the decoupling of individuals from research outputs – Symplectic Elements evolves with them. Our platform supports the full lifecycle of output-level evaluation, enabling institutions to assess research on its own merits, independently of individual profiles.

From managing submission pipelines to assigning expert reviewers, tracking progress via dashboards, and maintaining audit trails, Symplectic Elements ensures you’re prepared for REF2029 and future national assessments.

Supporting the REF

Reflections on the REF 2021

Using Symplectic Elements to support the Research Excellence Framework

“The most frequently mentioned reason for the negative attitudes to the REF is the excessive burden it creates in terms of time, resources, and worfklow.” (RAND Europe, 2021)

In this paper we explore:

How University of Essex used the Impact Module to collect REF3 Impact Case Studies.
Anglia Ruskin University’s progress in moving from manual to systematic curation.
How University College London used the Open Access Monitor functionality to ensure they meet the REF’s Open Access requirements.
The role of Elements in bulk data validation checks at Liverpool John Moores University.

Reflections on the REF 2021 →

Our new paper explores the role of Symplectic Elements as a Research Information Management System in supporting the REF submissions…

Client Showcase: Boston University on using Elements to streamlining Faculty Annual Reports →

Purdue University selects Elements as new faculty reporting tool →

“In 2021, we submitted just over 700 FTEs in 17 Units of Assessment, 1678 outputs and 67 impact case studies. If we tried to do that using the old method I dread to think what would have happened, so Elements was really invaluable in getting our REF submission in.”

Phineas Wenlock, Research Systems Manager, University of Essex

Faculty Annual Reviews

Faculty Annual Reviews are vital for professional development, recognition, and strategic planning. Symplectic Elements reduces the workload for both academic staff and administrators by bringing together verified data, intuitive workflows, and tailored evaluation forms in one place.

If your review process includes peer assessment of publications, our workflows can integrate discipline-appropriate peer review directly into the Annual Review process, with scores and reviewer insights automatically feeding into the record.

Tracking impact

Our specially-designed Impact Module allows users to capture evidence of the wider footprint and influence of their research. Impact doesn’t happen overnight, so our Impact Module allows researchers (or their proxies) to build up their impact records over time, adding narrative fields to capture events as they happen as well as adding associated files, links and references.

Symplectic Elements helps institutions build their own collection of structured, reusable impact records, ready to be curated into case studies, developed into news stories or included in reports to funders.