One Year Later, ProQuest Pivot™ is Making Research Funding and Collaboration Opportunities Easy to Find at over 350 Institutions

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- ProQuest is celebrating the first birthday of the innovative Pivot™ service, which streamlines workflow in university research offices.  Now in place in more than 350 institutions worldwide, Pivot enhances the rich combination of COS Funding Opportunities -- the most comprehensive, global source of funding -- and the acclaimed profiles in COS Scholar Universe to create a unique source for matching financial support to researchers and partners. Pivot provides universities with a single online location for their faculty, research administrators, managers and research development professionals to use for all funding opportunity searches, even those that rely on institution-specific data.

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"We have a 15-year track record of innovation in this arena, creating web-based systems that encourage collaboration in scholarly research and others that boost efficiency for our partners in research offices. Pivot integrates those previous systems, creating a robust solution to support the breadth of research development activity in universities," said Jeff Baer, Vice-President, Sales and Operations, ProQuest Research Solutions.  "As our newest product iteration marks its first year in the market, we're delighted with its immediate acceptance by universities around the world and its ongoing evolution as an ever-better and more precise tool for finding the right funding opportunities and the right team for the research project."

"I'm delighted with Pivot," said Alicia L. Gahimer, a research development specialist at Purdue University Indianapolis. "The best feature for me is the faculty match on the funding opportunities. It's much more efficient and convenient. When I show a faculty member how the funding opps also gives them a collaborator, they always say, 'Oh, Wow! That's what I need!'"

Throughout its first year, Pivot has continually expanded its service with a variety of new features, including those that enable users to...

• Set institution-wide search filters for funding.
• Identify funding specifically for researchers who are new in their careers with the 'New Faculty/New Investigator' category, which focuses on funding opportunities for the group that often needs the most help in securing funding.
• Create and manage groups for sharing funding opportunities.
• Add internal messages to funding opportunities for efficient communication of important information.
• Publicize the service to users through a free marketing toolkit.  

Pivot will continue to evolve in the coming months with updates to its look and functionality, a new online support portal that will connect users with the expertise resident in Pivot's acclaimed support team, and enhanced profile interoperability through VIVO, ORCID and ISNI. Further, expanded reporting functions will allow university administrators to more precisely track activity in Pivot to assess the level of engagement throughout the campus audience.

From Pivot's inception, institutions around the world have warmed to the convenience and ease it brings them. Combining the most comprehensive editorially-maintained database of $33 billion in funding opportunities with more than three million pre-populated scholar profiles, Pivot's proprietary connector algorithm enables matches between funding, faculty and collaborators.

In addition to the connections Pivot makes between funding and profiles, it includes tools that make the management of funding opportunities in the pre-award phase more efficient. Users can add internal deadlines to build effective timelines for seizing critical funding opportunities -- especially useful for limited submissions. Funding opportunities can be tracked and organized so that highest priorities take center stage. And users can easily stay on top of the funding landscape by saving and organizing their searches, monitoring action steps, and getting weekly updates on active opportunities. 

To learn more visit pivot.cos.com. 

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information.  Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world's knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms.  Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest's massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks® and Pivot™ services, as well as its' Summon® web-scale discovery service.  The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

SOURCE ProQuest