Using SciENcv: A New Requirement for NSF Proposals

So today I’m going to be talking about using SciENcv. It’s a new requirement for NSF proposals, and it will be a requirement for NIH proposals, although no one seems to know exactly when that’s going to happen.

My name is Cheryl Dykstra-Aiello and I joined the Office of Research Advancement and Partnerships in October as research development specialist. Before that, I worked in Spokane for seven years, most recently as an assistant research professor there. So before I get started talking about SciENcv, though, I wanted to bring your attention to some more information sessions that you might find interesting.

We’ve got Budget and Budget Justification at the end of the month so you can learn how to prepare your budget for your proposals and write your budget justification. I’ll be doing a lunch and learn hands on session for SciENcv. So if you want to have more hands on experience with it and walk through a tutorial with me, then please go and sign up for that at the March the 6th at noon and then March 19th, we’ll be presenting the key roles and responsibilities and what your expectations as the head PI will be.

So check that out at orap.wsu.edu/events. So today I’m going to be talking about SciENcv and these are the topics that I’m going to be going over. I’ll give you an overview, the features of SciENcv and how to access it. I’m going to spend some time talking about your ORCiD account and how that can help you in SciENcv.

What you can do with your information in your SciENcv forms, and how you can appoint a delegate to help you. And finally, we’ll talk about how to certify your documents. So going into the overview of the features and the access, so using SciENcv, you see this… SciENcv stands for Science Experts Network Curriculum Vitae, and it supports data input from across multiple systems.

So it’ll pull the data in for you. It makes things easier when you’re doing your funding application, you’re doing reporting requirements and even helping with collaborations with everyone doing the same kind of documentation. It does… For your grant application forms you can do your biosketches, you can do NSF, NIH, there are a few other ones and your financial support forms.

And the system uses a tax prep completion style. So just like when you go into your H&R Block or TurboTax and it pulls information from outside documents or from previous years, SciENcv, it kind of does the same thing. So it’s an easy to use application and you can, as I mentioned, you can do your biosketches for NIH and NSF.

There’s IES biosketch forms you can complete, you can do a fellowship biosketch for NIH. So not just the the research biosketches for R21s or R01s, etc., and then the NSF current and pending and other support documents. So what’s so great about SciENcv? Well, it makes you less dependent on the agency application guides. So it turns the forms that that the data that you’re putting into the forms, the output will be the way the agency wants to see them.

So you don’t really have to depend so much on the application guide. So you don’t have to go through 321 pages of the NIH application guide or the 203 pages of the PAPPG for NSF. You can create and store multiple biosketches, other documents, and you can create those documents either from scratch, you can pull in from a data source or you can copy them from a document that you already have in the system.

So some of the other features, you can output your forms on demand. So you don’t just do them for the application and then that’s it. You don’t lose access. You actually can go back in and print them at any point. You can print them as a PDF document or as a Word document and yeah, as I said, you can, you can do that at any point in time.

You can go back in and print those out. And one of the nice features is since PIs are busy, if you’ve got someone that you want to delegate to help you with your account management, someone in our office, or if you’ve got a post-doc or a grad student, you can delegate them to help you with your with your forms.

And then it it pulls data in and links to multiple and NCBI pieces of your account. So your bibliography, you can search the PubMed database, you can… you’ve got your saved searches in there. And then ScieENcv, which is also part of NCBI, is part of that. So it draws from from multiple places in NCBI.

And accessing it: you have many ways to get into SciENcv. So this is a screenshot of the homepage for SciENcv. And you can see that you can log in via your eRA Commons account, you can log in through NSF, and then there are more options which I show here for you so you can sign in with your your ORCiD account, login.gov, you can even sign it through Microsoft or Google.

So there’s many ways to get into it. And I’m going to specifically talk about ORCHiD, which I mentioned earlier, because it’s very, very helpful in completing your forms. So ORCHiD is Open Researcher and Contributor ID, you can sign in with that. So it’s an access point for you to get into SciENcv. It’s a persistent digital identifier for you, so it follows you using the data that you have in your ORCHiD account.

You can pull that data in to populate your forms in SciENcv, and that includes your citations that are in your ORCHiD account. So the way that you can add your ORCHiD account to SciENcv. This is a screenshot at the top of the SciENcv, or NCBI, and if you click on your username at the top right corner, that will pull up a dropdown menu.

And if you click on account settings, you will pull up kind of a longer list than this. You’ll have to scroll down and you can link your accounts and it’s very easy. You just click on the account underneath your linked accounts. And as you can see, I’ve already linked my my ORCHiD account and as of this morning, I have several other accounts linked there as well.

So NSF, login.gov, you can do all of those to link up so that you’ve got that accessibility. If what I provided you wasn’t enough there’s a help… a help manual that NCBI has specifically for SciENcv and you can access that to learn how to link your ORCHiD account, your eRA Commons for NSF and NIH. So they try to make it as easy on you as possible to use and access.

So going back to the ORCHiD, since it pulls in data from your ORCHiD account, you need to make sure that your ORCHiD account is up to date. And so you would make sure that your employment, everything in there was was current and that includes your citations. And then it pulls the information from your ORCHiD ID account. And the way that it populates is you have to when you’re starting your new documents, your NIH biosketch or fellowship biosketch, biosketch for NSF or for IES, even your current and pending other documents, you would want to click on an external source and that will come up with the dropdown menu.

You can choose ORCHiD. I think your eRA Commons is also one of the external sources that will be in that list and in this way then your your information from ORCHiD will pull in and populate your… the document that you are creating in SciENcv. So it’s easy. If you don’t want to use your ORCHiD account, then you can create your document as a blank document and input the information manually.

It’s a lot easier if you pull it in again, you can also use an existing document. So I have a couple of NIH biosketches in my SciENcv. I could use one of them and it will prepopulate the information from that document as well into the new document that you’re creating. So once the information is there, you it’s not it’s not permanently in the document that you’re creating so you can actually edit it.

So for instance, if you get in and you haven’t updated your ORCHiD account, you don’t have all of your current appointment information in there, then you can you can add it on your form. This is also the way that you add information on the form if you create a blank document, but so you can just add appointment position for instance by clicking add and it will bring up a little screen here for you to enter the information in.

And you can save just that if there’s only one or save and add another entry and it will continue to go until you’ve added everything in that you want to and enter, save it and then it will be on your list. If you’ve got some information, appointments, for instance, that you don’t want to include on your proposal, they just don’t they’re not relevant or they’re they’re outdated.

You can delete your old data, it will delete it off of your form in SciENcv, but it will not delete if you’ve pulled from ORCHiD, for instance, it’s not going to delete it off of the ORCHiD database and you’re going to want to include your cited works. So there’s two ways that you can do that. You can do that through the NCBI My Bibliography, which I have up here. You can click from your bibliography to add to your form If you want to add something other than what you’ve pulled in, you can click on “Add product” and it will bring up a screen and allow you to search PubMed for your citations

that you want to include. So you do your search and it will bring up what it finds through PubMed for the search keywords that you used. You click your little the little box and add to your bibliography. If you want to use ORCHiD to cite your work, as I mentioned, you have to make sure that ORCHiD is is up to date.

And I’ve included a help link for you too, so that you can follow that to update your citations within ORCHiD and that it pulls that information from ORCHiD into science for you. And that was the other tab in in your form for adding your citations. And as you can see, we’ve got some of my citations here already. If you’ve gone out to update your ORCHiD, you can refresh an ORCHiD here and it will refresh the information that you’ve just put in.

You can sort your your citations by date, by author. And interestingly, if you have a long author list, you can edit the authors, so you can shorten what your citations will look like if you need to save words on the page. So all you do for that you can click on the edit authors. It brings up the authors for you and you make your edits.

You save it, and then it puts it back in. And as you can see, it puts in, it lets you know that it’s an edited version. It keeps the original and then if you don’t want the edited version there anymore, you can remove the edited version. It will keep the original version, but it’s just a way that you can save for, you know, some of the some of the coauthors that you have if you’re with, for instance, Stroke has some groups that put out papers and there are many, many names there, so you might want to actually shorten them.

And this is an opportunity to do that. SciENcv lets you know that your your action was successful, so you successfully edited it and you also make sure that you know that it’s edited so you’re not going to mistake that it, that it was the original or be afraid that the original disappears because it’s still there. And then you can delegate your support, as I mentioned.

So you can have help doing your SciENcv if you just don’t have the time. You can delegate it to someone else and then certify your documents. You’re going to want to add your delegate through your username. Again, you’re going to go and click on your username to pull up your menu to go to account settings again. And at the very bottom, when you scroll down, you can add a delegate.

And so when you add a delegate, you’re going to end up with a screen where you can enter the delegates email address. The delegate will get an email saying that they’ve been delegated to help you with your account, and so they will click a link in that email to be able to get access. And then if they don’t already have an NCBI account, they’ll be invited to to register to get an account so that they can get in and and help.

So then this is what the delegate is going to see. They’re going to see that they have been delegated a document from someone, from someone from you, and they can manage this account by clicking on the name and it will pull up the documents they have access to. So they’ll see the PI’s name, they’ll see the PI’s identifying information, and then when they click on the document, they can get in.

So they’ll get into whatever whatever document you’ve given them access to. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be the NSF Current and Pending (Other) Support. Could be your biosketch. You could be giving them access to help keep your account current so they can then complete this document for you on your behalf. But they’re not going to be able to download the PDFs because they’re going to get a message that the PI needs to certify the document.

This is the case for the current pending other support documentation. You will also get that, get a notification if you click on this document. If you want to download the PDF, you’re going to get a notification that you need to certify it before it can be downloaded. So once the PI, you, have certified your document, then it can go back to your delegate and the delegate can download the certified form, you can download the certified form.

It’s just that before certification, the delegate cannot download. And I kind of talked very quickly, but I do have some helpful resources for you. So there are some tutorials that NCBI has put out for SciENcv. There’s a link here. I’ve already mentioned the help book and I’ve given the home page and the how to add your work to ORCHiD so that you can pull into SciENcv once you get in and you’ve worked around with it, you’ll see that it’s it really is user friendly.

And I encourage you to go in and and take a look and play around with it because it’s it’s very easy. It’s easy to use. You don’t have to… If you if you make a mistake on a form, you can delete the form very easily. You can create a new form very easily. And particularly if you’ve got your your information up to date in, in ORCHiD then you don’t really have to worry about populating your documents at all.

So if you have any questions, I’m happy to take them. Now, I do encourage you to check out our website and sign up for the other Information Sessions, and particularly if you would like to do the hands on session, the Lunch and Learn I’ll be happy to show you a walk through the the actual website with you.