How-To Guide

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1. Go to  http://opportunitymatch.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ while connected to the University network

OpportunityMatch is available to University staff and students, but requires use of the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN). To connect to the UoE VPN, follow the instructions provided here. It can be accessed by pointing your browser to  http://opportunitymatch.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

There is no need to register, you can simply authenticate using the EASE credentials you use on services such as MyEd.

You can also watch a short video of how to use OpportunityMatch at the bottom of this page. 

2. Search for researchers and research outputs

OpportunityMatch uses up-to-date information about all research outputs (e.g. projects and publications) from the University’s PURE database. You can search them using keywords (“Enter keywords for this search) and/or free text (“Enter your search as free text”) and pressing the “Search” button at the bottom of the page.

Keyword search works just like normal web search – the tool finds those documents where your keywords appear most often. The real power of OpportunityMatch is free-text search: You can enter arbitrary longer pieces of text (e.g. an excerpt from a funding call, text from a blog about a topic, an e-mail enquiry from a company), and OpportunityMatch will sort all research outputs by similarity.

3. Explore search results

After a couple of seconds, you will be taken to a results page, which provides a navigable graph of the top 10 search results, where your search is the blue node in the middle, connected to outputs (yellow) and people (red) associated with those outputs. Below the graph, a list of those results is provided in text form. You can navigate the graph by dragging it and zooming in and out using your mouse/tracker.

People and outputs are clickable in the graph and list, and take you to their PURE entries and OpportunityMatch profiles. At the bottom of the page you can click on to the next ten results – OpportunityMatch currently returns up to 100 results overall.

4. Manage and share your searches

At the search page, you can give your search a memorable name if you want to return to it (“Name your search”). If you don’t, your searches will appear in your “Recent Searches”/”Searches” tab with a simple timestamp (you can re-run, change, (un)share and delete your past searches anytime).

Another feature of OpportunityMatch is that you can make a search visible to other users by ticking the “Share this search” box. If it matches their profile or their own searches, both they and you will be notified by e-mail. If you change your mind, you can always decide to (un)share by editing the search in your “Searches” tab and (un)ticking the box.

5. Manage your profile

If you are a researcher with a University PURE profile, your Opportunity profile will be automatically generated from the database using all research outputs you are associated with. All other users can use all other functionalities of the tool, of course.

Your expert profile is accessible from the “Profile” tab on the left hand side, which shows a word cloud of keywords from all your outputs, your overall research network as a graph, and a list of all your outputs from PURE. If people click on your name in search results, they will be taken to this page.

OpportunityMatch allows you to enrich your profile with any additional content you want to be associated with your profile by creating new “documents” (which can be arbitrary pieces of text) added to your profile. To do this, simply press the “Create” button to add a new entry to your profile, which you can also name and associate keywords with. This could be, for example, a brief bio with up-to-date research interests, the summary of an unpublished piece of work, or new areas of interest you’re keen to be visible under. New user-generated entries will be automatically added to your profile and become searchable, but you can always edit or delete them.

6. Manage your notification settings

Under “Settings” at the top right of the page, all users can update their notification preferences. You can use this feature to be notified by email on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis if you are interested in being notified when your profile or searches match somebody else’s searches, or when new matches for your past searches have been found.  

7. The Opportunities tab

Under “Opportunities” you will find others’ searches that you matched to, provided they shared those searches – you can decide to contact colleagues if this sparks your interest and you would like to talk to them.

The video below demonstrates how to use OpportunityMatch.

If you have any questions or comments about OpportunityMatch, please e-mail us at opportunity-match@ed.ac.uk.