Cristin/NVA

UNIS gathers information about our scientific publishing activity in the national database for research information, Cristin. The database has several features that are important to us.

Cristin (Current Research Information System in Norway) is the national system for documenting research activity at universities, colleges, and other research institutions in Norway. The purpose of the database is to simplify the reporting of research results and annual data reports, provide important quality control, and contribute to the visibility of research performed in Norway. If you publish anything crediting UNIS, or while working at UNIS, it is your responsibility to make sure it is registered in Cristin. The UNIS Library will quality assure your registration.

Make sure your UNIS-affiliated scientific publications are registered

UNIS’ authors must make sure that their articles are registered in Cristin as soon as possible after publication, to be in compliance with funder’s requirements.

In the early spring, the Library publishes lists of UNIS’ scientific publications registered in the previous year. If you’ve published something that you can’t find in the list, make sure it’s registered! Deadline for reporting to the Ministry of Education and Research is usually at the end of March.

Most publications are included in Cristin by automatic import from Scopus. This might take some time. Some categories won’t be imported at all, such as books and book chapters, conference proceedings, and articles from some journals that aren’t indexed by Scopus. Please register your publications if any are missing. Contact the Library if you need assistance.

It is optional whether you want to register non-scientific results or previous publications with other affiliations than UNIS. Also note that for a publication to be eligible for registration in Cristin, at least one of the authors must be affiliated with a Norwegian institution.

Why register in Cristin

• Cristin, as the national system for documenting research activities in Norway, is the primary source for reliable statistics and analysis.
  
• The Research Council of Norway (RCN) uses Cristin as source for information about publications from RCN funded projects. The council requires that their six-digit contract number is tagged in the publication’s record in Cristin. This simplifies the status report process, as RCN’s report platform imports tagged records from Cristin. RCN has announced that as of 2022 they will make even more use of Cristin as a direct source for information about research results.  
  
• Cristin is also a tool for meeting research funder’s requirements for open access to research results. Publications that are uploaded in Cristin are made available in connected local institutional repositories. UNIS will make use of this functionality when the National Academic Repository (NVA) is launched in 2023.
  
• The annual reporting of scientific publications (Norwegian Scientific Index, NVI) is carried out in Cristin. UNIS doesn’t receive direct financial benefits for the publications points we earn, but we take part in the process to make sure our results are correctly registered, and to be included in national statistics.

The NVI reporting

The annual reporting of scientific publications (Norwegian Scientific Index, NVI) to the Ministry of Education and Research are strictly regulated and can be subject to revision.

The requirements for what kind of publications are eligible for the reporting, can be found here: Reporting instructions (NVI).

In short: An academic publication is defined by four criteria, all of which must be met. To be included in the reporting the publication must:

• present new insight, that is new research results based on the author’s research
• be presented in a form which makes the results verifiable or usable in new research
• be presented in a language and have a distribution which makes it accessible for the majority of researchers who may be interested in it
• be in a publication channel (journal, series, publisher, web site) with routines for peer review

Document categories in Cristin that are candidates for the reporting are: Academic article, Academic literature review, Academic anthology/Conference proceedings, and Academic monograph. The publications must be published in channels approved with level 1 and 2 in NSD’s publication channel register.

Note – whether a publication is reported or not is not a characterization of the work’s quality. It is merely a question of whether the publication meets the criteria for a specific type of work, as defined by the reporting instructions mentioned above.

How to register

The UNIS Library does not currently offer any courses or formal training in Cristin. You will find several useful resources at the Cristin homepage. Don’t hesitate to contact the Library if there are any questions.

When registering your publications in Cristin, make sure that you register the same affiliation that you credit in the publication, to ensure that both you and UNIS are credited correctly.

If your publication is based on a project funded by RCN, please make sure to register the six-digit contract number in the field Funding/Finansieringskilde. This is a requirement from RCN, and it will save you a lot of work in the status report process.

If you notice that your Cristin profile is still connected to a previous employer, you must contact this institution’s Cristin superuser and request that your connection is terminated. See Contact info super users.