Disclosure up front: I am an assistant professor and I make Vitae, a free Mac app for keeping an academic record. It appears in one section below, where it helps, and the guide works without it. Where I cite a vendor or a university, the link is next to the claim. I have not tested any of this against your campus's configuration, and nobody outside your campus can.
What each system can import
The names confuse people, so first the map. Faculty180 is Interfolio's Faculty Activity Reporting. Faculty Success is Watermark's product, formerly Digital Measures Activity Insight. Pure is Elsevier's research information system, mostly used outside the United States. Elements is Symplectic's, owned by Digital Science. The table says what a faculty member, not an administrator, can usually bring in.
| System | Publications | Whole CV | Usually typed or admin-loaded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Faculty180 (Interfolio) | Upload RIS or BibTeX through Generic import, which Interfolio turns on by default. Google Scholar's BibTeX export is the usual source. Possible duplicates are flagged if your campus enabled the check. | No faculty-facing CV import found in Interfolio's help. | Courses come from an administrator's bulk upload. Everything else is entered by hand. |
| Faculty Success (Watermark) | BibTeX upload, or a direct pull from Crossref, ORCID, PubMed, Scopus or Web of Science. | Upload a .doc, .docx, .odt or .rtf file, then pick the activity types so the system can read it. | Courses and grants often arrive from the registrar or sponsored programs. Check what is left after the CV import. |
| Pure (Elsevier) | Import from a file. RIS is preferred and BibTeX is next. Metadata only, no full text. | No. | Only research outputs import. Activities and other items are added by hand. |
| Elements (Symplectic) | Mostly harvested by name and ORCID iD from sources such as PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. You claim or reject what it finds, or add one by DOI. | No faculty file upload found. | Reporting use in the United States varies by campus. |
Sources: Interfolio's Generic import article and bulk data uploads; Watermark's publication import options and the University of South Dakota's CV import steps; the University of Edinburgh's Pure import page; the University of Oxford's Elements guide.
What you will still type
Plan on entering these by hand, unless your campus tells you otherwise:
- Courses taught, when your registrar does not load them.
- Grants and contracts, when sponsored programs does not load them.
- Advising and mentoring, committee work and other service.
- Invited talks and conference presentations. One university's Faculty Success guide says ORCID imports do not carry them, and a Faculty Success CV import is the likeliest way to read them.
- Awards and honors.
- The narrative: a self-assessment, goals for next year, and how your effort divided between teaching, research and service.
This is the real saving to look for. A file import covers the publications, which are the longest list but the easiest to get right. The hours go into the rest.
A workflow that fits any of them
- Find your system's import screen first. Open the page where you add publications and look for Import. Watermark's Import button can be missing if your campus did not enable it, and a missing button means a ticket to your faculty affairs office, not a workaround.
- Get the instructions and the due date. Departments often add a Word template on top of the system. Ask whether the year runs January to December or July to June (next section).
- Gather the year's outputs in one place. A Google Scholar profile, a Zotero collection or your own record, as long as it can export BibTeX or RIS.
- Choose the format your system handles best. BibTeX for Faculty180 and Faculty Success. RIS for Pure. The reason is below.
- Import, then review every record. Check types, dates, author order and duplicates before you accept anything. The system will often ask follow-up questions for each imported item, such as the type of peer review.
- Type the rest from your calendar and course list. Do the teaching, then service, then grants, then talks, while you still remember them.
- Write the narrative last, from the entries, not from memory.
- Keep your own copy. Export a PDF or a file from the system, or keep your record elsewhere. Your campus can change systems.
BibTeX or RIS?
For Faculty180, BibTeX. The University of Toledo's import instructions say RIS is not recommended there because several citation elements seemed to be missing or out of place after import. That is one campus's report, but its guide is specific and the BibTeX route is the one most campus guides describe. Watermark's help center says that BibTeX files are not strictly standardized and some fail to load, so a failed file is worth a second export from another source. Pure prefers RIS, per Edinburgh. If one format misbehaves, try the other before you retype.
Academic year or calendar year
The system does not decide this. Your department does, and it varies. Kansas State's physics department asks for a report for the calendar year 2025, due January 30, 2026. NC State's agricultural college asked for 2023 activities by February 1, 2024. The Sam Fox School at Washington University lists September 1 for tenured faculty reports. Some units run July to June instead, so do not assume. Many deadlines fall between January and May, so December is a good month to start.
Two habits help whichever rule you have. Write the rule down next to the list. And give every entry a full date, because a report built for a date range cannot place an entry that has none.
Checklist: what to gather before you open the system
- Your reporting period, the due date and the department's template, if there is one.
- Publications in the period with final title, authors in order, venue, volume, pages and DOI, plus the status of anything accepted or in press.
- Manuscripts under review or in revision, with the submission date.
- Grants: agency, role, dates, amounts and your share, for those submitted, awarded or active in the period.
- Courses with term, enrollment and your evaluation summary, and any new preparations.
- Students you advised or sat on committees for, with level and status.
- Service at department, college, university and professional level, including journal and conference reviewing.
- Talks, with event, location, date and whether invited or refereed.
- Awards and honors, with date and awarding body.
- Last year's report, to copy the structure of the narrative.
Where Vitae helps today
Vitae is free, and the parts below need no subscription. If you keep your record in it, it can produce the publications file for the year.
- Annual Review mode. In CV & Packages, choose Annual Review, then a calendar year, an academic year (you set the start month) or custom dates. The report limits publications to that period and includes a grant if its dates overlap it. Mentees appear in an Advising and Mentoring section.
- RIS and BibTeX files for that period. Choose Export for Annual Report to get a folder with both files, or use the Export menu, Publications in This CV, then RIS or BibTeX. The files follow the period you picked. Under Settings, Import & Export, the same two buttons export your whole library.
- What is in the file. Title, authors in order, venue, year, volume, issue, pages, publisher, DOI and URL. The RIS file also carries the abstract. Vitae stores a publication year, not a month, so neither file has one, and in an academic year a paper can land in the neighbouring period.
- Two things to check. In Annual Review mode, manuscripts under review are left out of the file. Works with no year recorded are kept in the list rather than dropped, so look for them.
Vitae's own export menu says the files import into Interfolio and Watermark Faculty Success. I have not tested a Vitae file against a particular campus, so use the review step above as your check. Vitae does not fill in your system's forms and does not make RIS or BibTeX files for teaching, service or grants. Vitae Plus adds a Word file with one heading per activity type (publications, presentations, grants, teaching, advising, service, awards) and a check for records missing details; those are also untested against a live system. It can export CSV tables of your records, which are handy to read from while you type. For a Word CV to feed Faculty Success, Rich Text (.rtf) export is free and is one of the file types Watermark accepts. A .docx export is part of Vitae Plus. For the year-end routine around the record, see Build your faculty annual report from your own record.
Frequently asked
Can Faculty180 import my courses, grants or service?
Not from a file you upload. Interfolio's help describes courses taught as an administrator's bulk upload, and its faculty-facing generic import creates scholarly contributions only. Grants, service and the rest are entered by hand unless your campus has loaded them.
Should I import from Google Scholar or from my own file?
Either works, and both end up as a BibTeX file. Google Scholar profiles collect duplicates and wrong years, so merge duplicates before you export. A reference manager or a record you curate usually has cleaner metadata. Interfolio also asks you to respect the terms of use of the source you import from.
Does ORCID import everything?
No. It reads publications that are visible on your ORCID record, it is typically a one-time pull, and your campus has to turn it on. One university's guide says presentations and awards do not come in that way.
Do I need an academic-year or a calendar-year setting in my own record?
Only if you want a file for exactly one reporting period. Vitae 1.3.0 has one: the Annual Review can be set to a calendar year, an academic year or custom dates. Without a setting like that, export the whole library or a calendar year, import it, and let the review step catch what is outside your window. Either way, Faculty180 can flag duplicates against what you already entered.
Will any file make the annual report write itself?
No. A file import saves typing for publications. You still verify each record, enter the other categories and write the narrative.
Related guides
- Import publications into Faculty180: the BibTeX steps, screen by screen.
- Import your CV and publications into Faculty Success.
- Convert references between BibTeX, RIS and EndNote.
- Export your ORCID works to BibTeX or RIS, and what to fix before importing them.
- Track your academic CV and tenure case, and best software for tracking your research record.
- Vitae, all products and all guides.