Research Explorer is an externally facing platform that enables anyone to discover more about the University's publications, impact, activities and staff. All academic staff are able to create a profile page (known at the University as a Pure profile) where you can share information about academic journey, teaching, research, publications, collaborations and more. 

You can see some examples of Pure Profiles from teaching colleagues below to get a sense of what this looks like. 

Benefits of a Pure profile

All academic staff are encouraged to have a Pure profile. Benefits of having a Pure profile include:

• Public profile - Your Pure profile is the primary way for anyone, internal or external, to find out about your teaching and scholarship (and other activities), to understand your expertise, and to find out how to contact you. This can be particularly useful for your students, or students looking to study with you who will find the information valuable.
• Sharing good practice and collaboration - Pure profiles are a valuable source of information for colleagues looking for exemplars of excellent teaching and scholarship (both internally and externally) and for those looking for colleagues to collaborate with.
• Celebrating your achievements - Pure profiles are an excellent place to record your achievements. From professional qualifications to awards, and all forms of dissemination of your teaching and scholarship (internal and external, formal and informal), Pure is an important place to record these so that others can share and celebrate your achievements.
• Professional development - It can be helpful to keep this updated for your own professional development, so that your expertise is clear to all, and to help you reflect on future areas for development. You can also export your Pure profile into a Word or PDF document.

Setting up a Pure profile

The University's Pure support website includes information, advice and guidance on how to set up, manage and update your Pure profile. It should only take a few minutes to activity your profile.

• Pure support website (StaffNet)
• Pure: An Introduction to Personal Profiles - online guide (whilst some content is aimed at researchers specifically, the content is useful for all staff with a Pure profile). 

By default, your Pure profile will not be publicly visible. To benefit from the public-facing nature of Research Explore, you will need to make your Pure profile publicly visible so that it can found via Research Explorer and other online search engines. You will need to populate your profile with relevant information, and if you have any outputs identified through an ORCID ID these can be imported into your Pure profile.

• Pure support: Managing your ORCID in Pure (StaffNet)

Adding your teaching and scholarship to Pure

When adding your teaching and scholarship to your Pure profile, we recommend that you include:

1. Your teaching at the University of Manchester
2. Your teaching qualification(s) and/or Advance HE fellowship status
3. Your Scholarship of teaching and learning

For experienced users, it will take approximately 30-minutes to add and populate information for these three aspects; this will vary depending on the amount of detail you wish to add to your profile.

Maintaining your Pure profile

To maintain your Pure profile and to ensure the information presented is up-to-date, it is recommended that you schedule some time to review and update your profile. This could be once per year or more regularly if you wish. You may find it useful to do this around the time of your P&DR to help you reflect on your achievements and goals. 

Further advice on maintaining and updating your Pure profile is available on the Pure support website on StaffNet.

• Pure support website (StaffNet)

Teaching and Scholarship exemplars on Pure

Studies show how varied and diverse teaching and scholarship academic profiles can be. To help you develop your own Teaching and Scholarship profile on Pure, please view these exemplars from Teaching and Scholarship colleagues which highlight and celebrate this diversity, and demonstrate how you can use your Pure profile to showcase your Teaching and Scholarship. 

• Pure profile: Loretta Anthony-Okeke
• Pure profile: Charlotte O'Brien
• Pure profile: Nicholas Weise
• Pure profile: Alison Harvey
• Pure profile: Harsha Parmar
• Pure profile: Sean Pert
• Pure profile: Claire McGourlay