IRIS FAQs

IRIS stands for Institutional Research Information Service and is a one-stop shop for information on research activity at UCL.

It brings together data from Human Resources, Finance, Student Records and Research Publishing systems.

The key focus is the Researcher Profile which displays HR information, chronologically listed publications and other outputs, individuals’ grants and contracts, and details of supervised students.

IRIS categorises research activity by Researcher, Theme, Groups and Departments:

• Researcher is an individual working as part of a Group or Department.
• Theme is way of categorising research. Examples of theme include “Ageing”, “Thoughts belief and Philosophy” and “Global Health”
• Groups are collections of several researchers who often come from different UCL departments.
• Department is an UCL organisational unit such as Chemistry or School of Life and Medical Sciences.

IRIS is a browser-independent application, meaning that all mainstream browsers     are valid (Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Dolphin, etc.)

Go to IRIS and login with your main UCL user ID and password.

IRIS presents quick-links on the left hand side of the screen to return to Home or to browse categories.

Within user profiles, IRIS also provides tabs (4 standard tabs for all to see, and 2 additional tabs for IRIS account holders).

In addition there are also breadcrumbs that can be used to go up to a parent page.

Research Staff have a profile created automatically, to be more specific the following occupation types are automatically provided with a profile in IRIS:

ACA* Anyone with an 'Academic' occupation type.

CLI* Anyone with 'Clinical' occupation types.

RES* Anyone with a 'Research' occupation type.

As well as the following:

** IRIS profiles for PGR students are being rolled out during summer 2021. Please see the schedule for when your department is scheduled for this roll out and your public profile is due to appear.

If you wish to hide your public profile, please see "How do I hide my public IRIS profile" below.

Please note:

If you do not belong to the above occupation types, exceptions can be made by senior management BUT users must be linked to Research in some capacity and be on the HR system as staff (this does not include 'Casual' staff).

Under Graduate students cannot currently have a profile because of data protection issues.  This may be addressed in a future release of Portico and become possible.

The following tables details information displayed in IRIS and where that data comes from.

Profile Tab

Publications Tab

Funding Tab

Students Tab

Achievements Tab

For more information explaining the available values for the Achievement Type field please see the IRIS Achievements Types help page.

There are several ways of doing this:

• If you know the researcher name use the Search Iris box on the home screen.
• Use the Browse option that appears n the left hand side of the screen once you deviate from the homepage.click on People under Browse, then you can search by A-Z, Research Group, Theme or Department.
• Use the More Search Options link under the string/text search box (on the homepage). 

At any point the Researchers' profile can be viewed by clicking on the researchers name . The profile includes contact details, a picture of the researcher, publications (including links to PDFs), grants (viewable by anyone who can login to IRIS), students the researcher is supervising and Achievements (such as memberships and awards).

You can either enter the keywords into the keyword search box on the IRIS homepage, or you can select the More Search Options link under the search box for additional search criteria that can help you narrow down your search.

If results are found the Type (Journal, Book, Conference etc), Name, Date and Author(s) are displayed.

Clicking on the Name shows Publisher, ISSN/ISBN and Abstract. There are links back to the Author and their Publications.

Here is a table of IRIS > SLMS mapping: 

Both external and UCL collaborators are linked to an activity in IRIS.  So, if two people link themselves to one activity in IRIS they are perceived as being collaborators. To remove this collaboration just disassociate yourself from the activity in IRIS.

Collaborators in IRIS are associated with a particular activity.  When collaborators are displayed in your SLMS profile a list is created automatically that includes ALL the collaborators from each of your activities. 

To add or a collaborator you must first create them and then associate each of them with a Research Activity. On the Edit Profile page click on any Research Activity and you will find a UCL Researchers tab for adding and removing UCL Collaborators and an External Researcher tab for adding and removing External Collaborators. Only collaborators associated with a Research Activity will be displayed.

By default your IRIS profile is visible to anyone who visits the IRIS database. To review this, and hide your public IRIS profile, go through the following steps:

1. Log into the IRIS database.
2. IRIS will show your visibility status when you log in.
3. Click on the Edit My Profile link.
4. Click on Visibility Link.
5. Set your profile visibility to hidden or visible.
6. Click on the Save button.

Edit your own profile by clicking on the Edit this Profile link at the top right of the profile screen. This shows the Control Panel from where the following can be changed:

Your First Name Last Name and your title are brought into IRIS from the HR system - If you are normally referred to by your middle name or another name you can set a preferred name through the HR MyView self service system - this will then display automatically in IRIS.

Please note that this can take up to 24 hrs to take effect. 

Once you have logged into IRIS, on your profile page, you will see two buttons next to the photo on the profile.

Click on Export This Profile button.

On the panel window that now displays, click on Export Profile as .docx Word document (Office Open XML format).

The profile can now be saved or viewed, including contents from all tabs except for the 'Student' Tab.

Yes.

Click on Edit my profile, on the top right once you have logged in to IRIS.

Then click on 'Location & Contact detail'.

At the bottom of the page, there is a heading 'Personal Contact Details':

• Twitter Username: enter in your Twitter handle (with or without the '@' symbol)
• LinkedIn Profile Page: enter in the full web address (URL) to your public LinkedIn profile page

Click on the Save button

Links to Twitter and/or LinkedIn will now appear on your profile page, at the top, underneath the other contact details.

As a researcher, you may be in receipt of external funding that is not captured in FIS, either because it falls outside the 'Frascati' definition of research or because it was paid directly to you or via a departmental or research group ledger account.

You can enter these into IRIS, and display them on your profile page (Note: all funding information for individual researchers is only viewable after login to IRIS, and is not displayed publicly to standard internet users).

Please check that the funding is not already being displayed under the funding tab before entering your funding details into IRIS.

Click on Edit my profile on the top right once you have logged in to IRIS.

Then click on Other Funding under 'Profile', and then click the +Add Funding button.

Fill in the following fields.

• Title: Full title of project
• Role: Select your role from the dropdown option list - recipient, co-recipient, other
• Award Type: research, council, charity, etc.
• Award Date: award date in dd/mm/yyyy format
• Funding Source: funder details
• Amount: enter amount without symbols
• Amount Currency: Select from dropdown - £,$,€
• Ledger Code: reference code
• Status: Select for dropdown - Active, Closed

Click Save to store the details.

This funding item will now appear under the 'Funding' tab under the 'Other' heading.

You can pull in individual, group or departmental data from the IRIS database at UCL directly into Drupal. See the Drupal CMS: Pull in IRIS profile how to guide.

Or, for other types of web page, follow the How to Include RPS data on your webpages guide.

Contact the IRIS project team and they can arrange this for you.

Themes can be regarded as umbrellas of related subjects that can cover multiple disciplines and are not mutually exclusive.

Themes can be accessed from the IRIS home page by clicking on the Research Themes link on the photo carousel.

Any given theme (once selected) can show multiple departments, groups and researchers.

Themes cannot be created or modified directly from IRIS. Any changes to these must be passed though The Office of the Vice-Provost Research.

Clicking on a theme displays a summary of the theme the main areas of research and any research groups involved in this area. An A-Z list of researchers is also displayed. Clicking on a researcher displays the researcher profile.

Groups (Research Groups) are essentially circles of like minded individuals with respect to a specific area of Research. Each group can consist of Research students as well as Research Staff, be associated to one or more Research Themes.

Click on an entry in the A-Z list of research groups.

Researchers may add themselves to research groups — see above, but only departmental heads (or Lead Department Administrators) may create them.

Contacts if data is incorrect:

You can learn more about IRIS on the IRIS website or use the IRIS self-service form for enquiries.

A number of the functions in the IRIS editor create an "Error on Page" message in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.  These include: "Insert Image", "Insert Link" and "Insert Code Snippet".  The workaround is to use a different browser like Firefox or Chrome.