What is a fingerprint?

A fingerprint is an index of weighted terms, visualised according to their weight, and is built from a back-end software system. It mines the text of scientific documents including publication abstracts, profile information and other sources. The weighted terms that result from this process are known as concepts in the Research Information Portal.

A fingerprint is generated for each researcher, each publication, and each organisational unit in Pure.The concepts created on persons are based on the researcher’s publications, prizes, and research interests. The publications derive their information mainly from the titles and abstracts.

Benefits of fingerprinting

By aggregating and comparing fingerprints, the system enables anyone to look beyond metadata and expose valuable connections among people, publications, funding opportunities and ideas.
With fingerprints it is easy to find researchers active in the same research field. Most other Dutch universities enabled this fingerprinting on their portal as well, which makes it possible to find colleagues in other universities, and even in the world.

Edit your fingerprints

It is possible to make some changes to your own fingerprints, if important concepts are missing or incorrect concepts are showing. Log in to Pure and select ‘edit profile’. You can find the fingerprints on the left side bar. By hovering over concepts you can omit concepts by checking the ‘X’ per thesaurus. It is also possible to omit a whole thesaurus at once. The three thesauri that are used are ‘Keyphrases – INIS – and Neuroscience. When logged in to Pure, you can find more information in the manual Edit fingerprints.


Don’t forget to save when you’re done!

More information

For more information on this fingerprinting functionality follow this link *or contact the UM Pure team.
(*you need to be logged in to Pure to view this link)