YUFA reminds members: using DYA is optional.

Colleagues in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences who have ‘migrated’ to using  the DYA (Discover York Academics) system have been disconcerted by the low citation counts shown in their DYA profiles. 

DYA, a product of the UK firm Symplectic Elements, prioritizes STEM-oriented citation sources like Scopus, Web of Science, and Dimensions (and does NOT use Google Scholar), so DYA omits many publications by humanities and social science researchers, particularly community-oriented and public-facing publications deemed "grey literature".  

This means that the citation counts in DYA profiles for many YUFA members will not accurately reflect our true publications record and the public dissemination of our research, of which many of us are rightfully proud.  

Colleagues in LAPS have asked the DYA office about this, and the response was that the DYA service provider, Symplectic Elements, has its algorithm set up, so the decision about what kind of publications matter is an embedded part of DYA.   

The Symplectic Elements website says their “Research Management Ecosystem” is “highly-configurable” and “ingests data from multiple sources to build a truly comprehensive picture of your organizational data … all within one easily-navigable, single source of truth”.

But York representatives of DYA call the software’s citation sources “curated, subscription-based” which “index a defined set of journals and, to a lesser extent, books and conference proceedings…. which may be less comprehensively covered by curated databases”. Books, chapters, non-English language publications, and other scholarly outputs are not well-represented.  And DYA apparently cannot tailor the citation sources for York University’s needs even if it wanted to.  

What the York DYA office has tentatively offered colleagues to address this is the possibility of just removing the citation count from a DYA public profile, if the faculty member so chooses.  It is not clear, however, how that might be done.  And this would mean that the colleague’s citations record would be entirely omitted from their DYA public profile, as if it does not matter at all.

A 2021 study in the journal Scientometrics which compared various citation data sources with regard to their differences across subject categories found that “Google Scholar is still the most comprehensive source” and that many Google Scholar citations were not found by Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, or Dimensions.

YUFA has consistently recommended that colleagues consider carefully whether it makes sense for them to take the time to "migrate" or try to set up a DYA profile. The support offered earlier to help faculty members transfer cv information into their DYA profile has recently evolved into an invitation to attend workshops to ‘migrate’ to DYA.  

YUFA representatives continue to discuss this with the Employer at the Joint Committee on the Administration of the Collective Agreement (JCOAA). The next JCOAA meeting is October 29.

York faculties and units are now being told to do away with Faculty websites highlighting and publicly sharing faculty members' fields of study, teaching, and research.  YUFA encourages members to discuss this at unit-level and Faculty Council meetings, and at the Senate, since it will determine how our scholarship and professional standing is represented to the public by our Employer, a publicly-funded university.

YUFA members do still have the choice of whether to participate in DYA.