Pivot contains the largest available collection of searchable profiles of full-time faculty. It provides authoritative information about more than 3 million scholars around the world, together with verified affiliation and publication information. The database comprises international faculty at 4-year universities and their departments. It is a unique tool for finding researchers by specific area of study, providing keyword access to the community behind the content. Some highlights include: 

• More than 3 million profiles
• International and multidisciplinary in scope
• Editorially controlled
• Regularly reviewed for accuracy and currency
• Ability to update portions of your profile

Pivot Profiles include key biographical information, research interests, selected publications, and contact information, enabling users to identify and contact relevant scholars based on their research, publishing, and professional credentials. They are created for faculty members listed on University academic department websites. If department websites are unavailable, or if no faculty members are listed on a department’s website, faculty profiles will be created based on the data available. They are created for part-time and adjunct faculty and in some instances, graduate students as well. Pivot takes an inclusive approach to creating profiles.

Updating your Pivot profile

Pivot provides the capability for you to update all fields or areas of your profile. Updating your profile can increase the quality of the funding matches recommended for you from the Pivot Advisor.

You can currently update the following sections of your profile:

• Name
• Email address(es)
• Photo:  Add or change a photo
• Webpages or documents (with publications, CV, or other information)
• ORCID: ORCID® (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.With your ORCID ID added to your Pivot profile further enhances funding recommendations for you. Linking your ORCID IDis easy:
  1. Create or add your ORCID iD using the ‘Edit’ profile button.
  2. Authorize ProQuest to link your ORCID Profile to your Pivot Profile
     Learn more at www.orcid.org.
• ISNI: Click the edit icon to enter your ISNI ID.  Not sure what an ISNI ID is? ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) is an ISO standard developed as a global identification system of public identities across all fields of creative activity. Simply put, it’s a unique identifier that is used by libraries, publishers, databases, and rights management agencies as a way to identify millions of contributors to creative works including researchers, inventors, writers, and more. Learn more at www.isni.org.
• Expertise: Add information here to improve your Pivot Advisor.
• Affiliations (both past and present): Listing all your previous and current affiliations will assist in the publication linking process.
• Education
• Keywords
• Languages
• Associations
• Honors
• Publications
• Patients
• Grants

Publications are updated through our linking process. In addition, you can upload a document that reflects your publication link. These also are indexed and discoverable immediately.

Pivot Profile information is added in one of two ways: harvested by our editorial team or added/updated by the profile owner directly.

Harvested data

The Pivot profile editing team uses publicly available information sources to build profiles from Universities around the world. The following information, when available, is harvested when profiles are created:​

• Name
• Email Address
• Webpages (homepages, pages that list publications, and CV pages)
• Degree Information (institution, degree type, discipline, year)
• Research Interests
• Current academic departmental affiliations (includes role/position)
• Publication information is also collected and linked to your profile by way of an automated proprietary matching algorithm that attempts to link publications to your profile from the following sources:
• PubMed citation database
• ProQuest citation databases
• CSA citation databases
• ERIC citation database
• Agricola citation database

Together these databases contain over 60 million publications. Only publications that can be “definitively” linked to your profile will be displayed on your profile page. In addition, addresses and communities are automatically determined and added to profiles. If any of the above information is not available on the faculty webpages, it will not be harvested when the profile is created. 

Data added by the profile owner

Once you have claimed your profile, you can provide additional information to what is already listed. In addition to information our editorial team includes, profile owners can update and provide:

• A document with additional publication information (accepted file formats are .doc, .docx, .html, .odt, .ods, .odp, .pdf, .ppt, .pptx, .rtf, .txt, .text, .xls, .xlsx). Pivot will index and make these docs searchable from the Quick and Advanced Search areas
• Links to webpages with publications (also indexed and searchable)
• CV Webpages or documents (also indexed and searchable)
• Additional email addresses (current and past)
• Additional affiliations (current and past)
• Middle name(s) and initials
• Expertise and Other Information – free text fields that allow you to add a new or update an existing expertise statement. The other information free text field can be used to provide additional information