Researcher Systems and Data Resources

For researchers at Northwestern University, several data resources and systems are available to support your work.

Finding Specific Research Systems

Login to the NUPortal to access research administration systems such as:

Data, Computing, and Analysis Tools

In addition to the systems above for managing research, Northwestern provides a range of tools and services to support the collection, analysis, and management of research data. These include, for example, tools that help researchers manage and share their data and analyze and visualize data throughout the research lifecycle. NUIT Research Computing and Data Services serves as the central hub for Northwestern’s research data infrastructure and support.

Visit Research Computing and Data Services

Office for Research Metrics

Research Analytics provides analytics services and expertise to the Office for Research administrative units and publishes metrics for various units. The latest annual Research Activity Report is available, along with trends in sponsored funding and expenditures and links to historical annual summaries for individual OR units.

For a current year overview of Northwestern sponsored research activity, year-to-date totals for proposals, awards and contracts are shown on the Sponsored Research landing page. The Sponsored Research Reports and Metrics site, accessible by NetID holders, provides detailed snapshots refreshed nightly of current workflow queues, year-to-date breakdowns by funding category, and workflow turnaround time distributions for proposals, awards and contracts. . Additional SR Performance Indicators provide trends over the past six months in negotiation-related activity. You can also request Sponsored Research data.

The Innovation and New Ventures (INVO) office’s annual Innovation Impact Report highlights inventive activity from the most recent fiscal year; earlier years are also available for download.

The Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee office Metrics page provides a comprehensive overview of IACUC activity over a rolling 12-month window, including the number of active protocols, new and amendment submissions, and average turnaround times by review type.

The Institutional Biosafety Committee team in the Office for Research Safety will be publishing a similar comprehensive overview later in FY26.

Finding and Tracking Scholarly Output

The Northwestern Scholars service was discontinued October 2025, but you can search for Northwestern-authored scholarly output at the open-source site OpenAlex, and find ORCID holders with Northwestern affiliations at these links. The Northwestern University Libraries subscribes to several proprietary citation databases as well, including Elsevier’s Scopus and Clarivate’s Web of Science. For longitudinal analysis of Northwestern’s scholarly output, the library’s Web of Science XML archive is available with a NetID and password. The Feinberg School of Medicine hosts Symplectic Elements to aggregate FSM scholarly products; more information here.

The Office for Research recommends individual faculty members and researchers establish an ORCID profile if they have not already, connect it with their NetID (see https://sites.northwestern.edu/orcid/ for more information), and take advantage of search & link wizards that can import publications data from myriad sources. Ongoing automated publication imports can be set up from a number of sources as well, including CrossRef, DataCite, Scopus and Web of Science.

Investigators supported by the NIH and NSF can save time re-entering data by connecting their populated ORCID profile to SciENcv to generate the common forms required at proposal submission and just-in-time stages. Learn more at https://libguides.galter.northwestern.edu/SciENcv