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School of Media, Arts and Humanities - for students and staff

Your Elements Profile

Elements is the Current Research Information System (CRIS) now in use at the University.

Elements supports the management of research activities by providing one single point of organisation, presentation and reporting for all scholarly and research activities, including research publications. It also hosts the University staff profile pages.

It's really important that every member of faculty in Media, Arts and Humanities has an up to date profile on Elements, so we would encourage you to review and update yours regularly, particularly when you have a new publication accepted or published. Please note that it remains a requirement of REF and Open Access compliance that an Author's Accepted Manuscript of all journal articles and conference proceedings should be added to an institutional repository within 3 months of *acceptance*. 

Updating your profile  

Go to and log in with your usual Sussex user name (e.g. aa001@sussex.ac.uk) and password.

Once you are in Elements you will see a tab labelled Go to your profile below your name. Click on this tab to access your profile page.

As a minimum, your profile should include the following:
1. A good quality recent photograph (click on manage photo at the bottom of your current profile picture to upload a new one)
2. Under the About tab a biographical paragraph or two in your Overview section. This should be written in the *first person*
3. A paragraph in the Research interests and Teaching summary sections, written in the *first person*
4. Some tags in the Fields of Research section. These act as keywords to give the reader a quick sense of your areas of expertise and interest. Click on the edit button and this will open a new box where you can select tags from a pre-defined list. We recommend selecting no more than seven tags 

Don’t forget to click save as you update each section!

For a more detailed guide to updating your profile see the Elements Profile Guide

Updating your publications 

Go to and log in with your usual Sussex user name (e.g. aa001@sussex.ac.uk) and password.

There are two main ways to add your publications to Elements:

1. Claim your publications from a list that Elements will suggest based on an automatic online search. Once you claim a publication as yours, you will be prompted to deposit the AAM (Author Accepted Manuscript) toSussex Research Online (SRO), which the University is still using for purposes of REF (so it's really important outputs are deposited there via Elements). See the  for more detailed guidance. 

2. Manually add a record of your publication to Elements. This will be necessary if your publication has been accepted but not yet published, and if it is a journal article or conference proceeding the accepted manuscript needs to be deposited within three months of acceptance in order to be open access (and REF) compliant. You can add your publication by clicking the "+ Add New" button under the 'Publications' box on the homepage. Don't forget to also follow the prompts to deposit the accepted manuscript version of your publication to SRO. See the Guide to Adding a Manual Record for more detailed guidance.

Updating your grants

Grant information displayed on Elements is supplied by a feed from the central Research and Enterprise team, and cannot be added or edited by individuals outside that team. It's a good idea to include a sentence or two about any grants you hold in the 'Overview' section of your profile page. See the Elements help page on grants for more information. 

If you are having any issues with Elements and would like some assistance please get in touch with mah-research@sussex.ac.uk and we will be happy to help. There are also help pages on the Elements site.