Symplectic Elements is a faculty activity reporting system from Digital Science. It replaced the Watermark DMAI product in the Fall of 2024. Elements will be the repository demonstrating the work and achievements of IU’s faculty.
After careful consideration and evaluation, a task force, comprised of nine faculty and nine staff members, made the recommendation to transition from our DMAI application to Symplectic Elements for our Faculty Activity Reporting needs. This recommendation was based on input from faculty across the organization on the needs and opportunities to better support your work.
The transition to Elements is aimed at addressing current issues with data entry and reporting, enhancing user experience, improving efficiency, and providing you with better tools to manage and report your academic activities. Elements offers several advanced features that will streamline the reporting process and provide more comprehensive insights into your scholarly endeavors.
Elements@IU is now available to all faculty via One.IU.
When you first log into Elements, you should see all of your previously entered DMAI data as well as any data that Elements has harvested from it’s IU-internal and external sources on your behalf.
Several data sources will be automatically fed into Elements including:
- Grant information from Kuali Coeus (KC) will be fed into Elements.
- SIS - Courses information from SIS will be fed into the “Courses Taught” activity type. Course data will be fed into Elements shortly after all of the sections an instructor is teaching in a given term have concluded.
- Human Resources Management System (HRMS)- new accounts will be created overnight to allow access for logging into the application along with employee title information will populate user profiles with IU appointment data.
- Harvested publications data – from a variety of bibliographic databases.
Publication data will be harvested and available from a variety of data sources. The following data sources will either be searched automatically or available for faculty to self-search within: arXiv, Dimensions, MLA, ORCID, PubMed, Scopus, SSRN, and Web of Science.
Crossref will be available and refreshed monthly, searching based on identifiers claimed within Elements.
Google Scholar will be available for searching when entering a record manually, however if you use Google Scholar regularly, you can import your works by importing a .bib or .ris file directly into Elements. For more information on how to import Google Scholar publications into Elements, please visit the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
Integration with the IU ScholarWorks repository will be coming in Spring 2025.
Course Data from SIS will be fed into the “Course Taught” activity type within Elements.
Teaching will be integrated into Elements in a new way to enhance the experience for faculty and better showcase their teaching efforts on our campuses starting with 2024 courses data and forward. Previously, each unique section was imported into DMAI, which was cumbersome for faculty who teach multiple sections of the same course or multi-section courses. This process required extra effort to accurately represent the innovative work our faculty do in the classroom.
In Elements, we will import one record for each unique course a faculty member teaches in a semester. This record will include the number and type of sections and the total number of students, saving faculty time in annual reporting and more clearly representing their work in public profiles (e.g., web profiles)."
Symplectic Elements is a European product which uses British English. While some screens and fields are configurable, many British spellings are hard coded and we have opted to match the hard coded language for consistency throughout the product.
Acting on feedback from faculty on the former system, there are very limited required fields in Elements. For the majority of activities, the only required fields are a title and date. All required fields are indicated with a red asterisk *. All other fields are optional, and it is not expected that you enter data into every field. It is up to each faculty member how much information is necessary for each activity.
Yes! We are offering a variety of in-person and virtual training options. You can find a link to our upcoming training schedule as well as recordings, handouts, and guides at our Support Materials page.
Yes, this will be configured and available in the Elements reporting framework.
Yes! This system will be available for faculty to access and add activities year-round.
Elements does not have the same attachment functionality as the former DMAI system. Rather than attach documents to an individual activity, files can be attached as part of the Annual Report workflow.
We anticipate the attachment component of the workflow process being available when the Annual Report workflow is broadly available for the 2025 cycle.
Yes! View the Elements demo. (https://youtu.be/aca0GSxfbDw?si=zA3lceYJtfW7tDPX)
Using Elements
Within Elements, you can control your own delegates. Using the main menu, under the “My Profile” tab, navigate to “Settings” and select “Account Settings.” At the top of the screen, you can search for and add delegates. When you no longer need that delegate to have delegate access, use the trash can icon to delete that delegate.
Find the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
If you have been assigned as a delegate for an Elements user, log into Elements and look for the two person icon on the right side of the top tool bar. Select that icon and then use the tool to identify and select the user you have permission to impersonate.
Find the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
There are a wide array of ways you can manage activities in Elements. You can find guides on our Support Materials page that will show you how to manually add or edit activities, claim or reject activities, join or split records, and more!
On the details page for each item, the “Edit Type” button will allow you to quickly move an object from one activity type to another within the same category. The “Edit Type” button is the small pen icon next to the activity type at the top of each details page or summary section.
This is especially useful when updating an item from “Work in Progress” to a specific publication type, such as “Article” or “Book.” Find the full guide to adding and editing records on our Support Materials page.Unlike changing activity types within a category, it is not possible to change activity types between the categories.
If there is an activity in the category you would like the item to appear in which meets your needs, you may wish to manually re-enter it into that category. This is most useful for items that came in from DMAI that have more accurate activity types in the Elements model.
We would recommend using the Area of Excellence Label scheme to add a label reflecting the area (such as teaching, research, service, or librarian performance) you would like the activity to be reported as. Using the label will allow for activities to surface in their tagged areas in reports.
An example of this would be tagging a Professional Development activity, which resides within the Service & Leadership category, with the label:0 Teaching. This would allow that item to be reported as a Teaching activity or searched for and pulled into an appropriate list of Teaching Related Activities on an Annual Review Workflow.
Find the full guide to using label schemes on our Support Materials page.You can review and adjust how Elements is searching for publications related to your Name Based Search Settings. Find the full guide and screenshots on our Support Materials page.
Detailed information on the scholarly metrics and H-Indices in Elements is available on our Support Materials page in the “Understanding Scholarly Metric and H-Index” guide. Please review these materials or reach out to your local IU Librarians to learn more about interpreting scholarly metrics.
When manually entering a Grant & Contract activity in Elements, follow these steps to assign roles such as Principal Investigator (PI), Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) or Supporting Personnel:
- Indicate Your Relationship: In the first field, specify your relationship with the grant.
- Add Additional Investigators:
- For IU-affiliated investigators: Search for the individual using their last name and select them from the drop-down list. IU-affiliated investigators will initially be assigned the role of “Personnel” on the Grant & Contract activity.
- For non-IU-affiliated investigators: Enter their name manually to add them to the activity.
- Claim Activity:
- Once the additional investigators claim the activity in Elements, their role can be changed via the “Relationships” section.
- Edit Relationships:
- Navigate to the “Relationships” tab of the activity.
- Select “Users” and click the “Edit” button next to the investigator’s name to modify relationship types or reporting dates.
2024 Annual Review Process
If your unit is not participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you will want to contact your academic leadership for more information about your 2024 annual review process and expectations.
For those units which previously used the “Annual/Multi-Year Report” in Watermark DMAI, a similar report has been made available in Elements, accessible in the “CV and Reports” button in the top right corner of your Elements profile screen. This report will contain the activities reported in Elements within the time period indicated in the “Start date” and “End date” fields.
Due to the major system differences between Elements and DMAI, you may find that you need to compile attachments and other supporting materials outside of the system such as through the use of email attachments when you submit your report or manually including hyperlinks to shared documentation in the Word Document version of the downloadable report.
A complete user guide for this report is available on the Elements Support Materials page.
If you are an administrator for a unit not participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you can still generate the Annual/Multi-Year Report/Annual Faculty Report. To do this, follow these steps:
- Role Assignment: Ensure you are assigned the “Statistician (RI)” role in Elements for your department or school.
- Request Access: Email elements@iu.edu to request access. Specify the Org code and the unit/school for which you need access.
- Generate Report: Once your access is set up, you can run and generate the Annual Faculty Report for your faculty.
If your unit is participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you will use the Elements Evaluation module to submit your 2024 annual review. The Annual Review exercises will automatically pull in all the activities you have reported in Elements for 2024. You can then adjust the activities and attach any supporting materials to meet your preference and departmental requirements set by your academic leadership.
A complete user guide to this process is available on the Elements Support Materials page.
Review exercises in Elements are only viewable to those with the appropriate permissions, otherwise, they are private. The faculty reviewee, any assigned reviewers and viewers, and limited system administrators can view the exercises and submitted materials.
Once completed, your review will remain visible for future reference to the reviewee and any associated reviewers and viewers in Elements.
If your unit is participating in the Annual Review Workflow Pilot, you will use the Elements Evaluation module to conduct your reviews. Once faculty members submit their review exercises, the reviews will route up through the stages of reviews. When it reaches your level, you will have the opportunity to review their activities and attachments, including space to rate, provide comments, and upload attachments based on your academic unit’s review expectations.
There are no reports available for the Annual Review Workflow Pilot at this time. We will be developing workflow reports based on the feedback from our pilot participants and the expressed reporting needs of academic leadership across the institution.
Transition from DMAI
All data entered into DMAI prior to its retirement on August 1st, 2024 will be transitioned into Elements as part of its implementation.
This data migration is expected to take several months but should be completed by early 2025.
While the Elements Implementation Team did extensive work mapping DMAI activity data to the fields available in Elements, many items were entered into DMAI using “other” field types. These “other” items may match newly available activities or sub-types available in Elements, but due to the volume and variety of data to be migrated, the Elements Team was unable to tease individual records out from these “other” categories.
We encourage users to use the new types available to them in the manner they best see fit, be that editing migrated DMAI activities or only using the new activity types when entering new information into Elements.
We will not be able to move the attachments over as Elements does not support that on the activity screens.
The last day to access DMAI was October 31, 2024.
If the copy within DMAI was the only copy of an attachment you had access to, please email elements@iu.edu for support.