Software and Documentation

Profiles Research Networking Software is available for free under a standard BSD Open Source license.

Community Wiki

Visit the Profiles RNS Google Group for additional information about the software not available on this website.

Profiles RNS Google Group

Technical Requirements

Microsoft SQL Server (versions 2012 through 2017) database server (Standard or Enterprise Editions)
Microsoft Windows IIS 7 or later web server with .NET 4.6.2
Apache Tomcat with Java to support the optional ORNG extension

We recommend a physical database server. Some institutions have found a virtual machine is sufficient for the web server. Database storage will vary, but an instance with 10,000 people will require about 100 GB storage and 16 GB RAM. Profiles RNS works on both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.

How to Cite Us

Profiles RNS is a grant-funded project. Our continued support depends on us being able to report on who is using our software. Please include the following acknowledgment on an easily accessible page of your Profiles RNS website:

This service is made possible by the Profiles Research Networking Software developed under the supervision of Griffin M Weber, MD, PhD, with support from Grant Number 1 UL1 TR002541 to Harvard Catalyst: The Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and support from Harvard University and its affiliated academic healthcare centers.

ORNG and SEO additions to Profiles RNS are made possible by UCSF's Clinical and Translational Science Institute, funded through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (grant Number UL1 TR000004) at the National Institutes of Health.

Profiles RNS Version 3.1.0

The key features of Profiles RNS include:

Import human resource data (name, addresses, title, affiliations, etc.)
Automatic PubMed article and NIH grant import and name disambiguation
Passive networks, such as top concepts, co-authors, similar people, same department, and physical neighbors
Concept clouds, concept categories, geographic maps, and radial graph visualizations
User editing of profile content, with full control over privacy settings and proxy capabilities
Group Profile pages for research centers, laboratories, departments, and more
Optional ORCID extension to create unique author IDs and synch profile content with ORCID.org.
Optional eagle-i extension to connect to investigators' research resources.
Enhancements to optimize Profiles for optional search engine discoverability
Social network analysis metrics are calculated for co-author networks and stored in the database, but are not displayed on the website
Profiles RNS is a Semantic Web application based on the VIVO 1.4 ontology, with support for RDF, SPARQL, and Linked Open Data (LOD).

This version of Profiles RNS was released on July 5, 2021.

Go to the Profiles RNS 3.1.0 software and documentation download page

This release contains caching improvements, which result in significantly faster page load times compared to earlier versions of Profiles RNS. View the Release Notes for a complete list of changes. The Profiles RNS 3.1.0 download contains upgrade scripts to convert a Profiles RNS 2.0.0 or higher database to Profiles RNS 3.1.0. In order to upgrade from earlier versions of Profiles RNS, first upgrade to Profiles RNS 2.0.0 (see below for links to older versions), and then apply the Profiles RNS 3.1.0 upgrade scripts.

Profiles RNS patch to address October 2020 changes to NIH/NLM E-utilities API

In early October 2020, the NIH/NLM made 2 changes to their E-utilities API, Firstly, they updated their SSL security to TLS1.2; and, secondly, they changed their API rate limits. These changes prevent Profiles RNS users from searching for, or importing PubMed articles while editing their profiles. View instructions on how to patch Profiles RNS Versions 2.11.0, 2.11.1, 2.12.0 and 3.0.0 to restore this functionality. Unfortunately, earlier versions of Profiles RNS use .Net 3.5, which does not provide support for TLS1.2 certificates. Because of this, no patch is available for these versions.

Profiles RNS Disambiguation Service (Medline Publications)

Profiles RNS uses a Disambiguation Engine to obtain Medline articles for a person. This is an XML-based web service that can be used independently of the Profiles RNS software. You send the service a person's name, email addresses, affiliations, and any known Pubmed IDs, and it will return all Pubmed IDs that match according to a specified probability threshold. The Profiles RNS Disambiguation Engine works by first identifying "seed" publications that have a very high match probability, and then using the authors, MeSH terms, article title words, journals, and affiliations of those articles to find additional matches. View the Disambiguation Service Documentation for more information.

Older Software Versions

Below are past releases of Profiles RNS. Institutions are encouraged to use the Lastest Version of the software. View the Release Notes for more information.

Profiles RNS 3.0.0 - Released on June 18, 2020 - New Person List tool for creating reports and exporting data on a list of people
Profiles RNS 2.12.0 - Released on September 12, 2019 - New look and feel, and enhanced publication module with citation counts
Profiles RNS 2.11.1 - Released on June 5, 2018 - Bug fixes and performance improvements.
Profiles RNS 2.11.0 - Released on May 1, 2018 - Group Profiles, minor bug fixes, support for .NET 4.6.2 and SQL Server 2017
Profiles RNS 2.10.0 - Released on January 5, 2017 - NIH grant disambiguation, Live Updates showing recent profile changes
Profiles RNS 2.9.0 - Released on August 12, 2016 - Research Funding, Freetext Keywords, and Education and Training modules
Profiles RNS 2.8.0 - Released on May 11, 2016 - Flash visualizations replaced with HTML5, Almetric Badges on publications
Profiles RNS 2.7.0 - Released on August 10, 2015 - Active Directory and Shibboleth authentication, Activity Log
Profiles RNS 2.6.0 - Released on March 23, 2015 - Section 508 compliance, vCards, links to PubMed Central
Profiles RNS 2.5.1 - Released on September 18, 2014 - ORNG enhancements and integration with ORCID and eagle-i
Profiles RNS 2.5.0 - Released on August 5, 2014 - Performance enhancements and bug fixes [developer's release]
Profiles RNS 2.1.0 - Released on July 25, 2014 - Integration of ORNG with the Profiles RNS ontology [developer's release]
Profiles RNS 2.0.0 - Released on August 9, 2013 - Added support for Open Research Networking Gadgets (ORNG)
Profiles RNS 1.0.4 - Released on June 7, 2013 - Performance enhancements and bug fixes
Profiles RNS 1.0.3 - Released on March 13, 2013 - Performance enhancements and expanded Concept and Publication profile pages
Profiles RNS 1.0.2 - Released on August 21, 2012 - User interface enhancements, such as new visualizations and connection pages
Profiles RNS 1.0.1 - Released on July 3, 2012 - Full editing of profile content; standardized code and database object names
Profiles RNS 1.0.0 - Released on June 1, 2012 - Rewrite of Profiles RNS to use linked open data (RDF) with the VIVO ontology
Profiles RNS Beta - Released on July 22, 2011 - Pubmed disambiguation, active and passive networking, network visualizations