AAR 2025: A month to ensure the reliability of academic output
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A look back at a key campaign for EPFL units: validation of activities, improvement of data quality, and a strong increase in ORCID identifiers, thanks to coordinated support between the Library and IT Services.
The Annual Academic Report (AAR) validation campaign took place from mid-March to mid-April 2026. During this period, unit heads— especially laboratories—reviewed their activities and academic output from the previous year, particularly publications and patents referenced in Infoscience.
The EPFL Library’s Repositories team was fully mobilized to support this process, providing a dedicated web page and responsive assistance to address users’ questions and needs.
The 2025 AAR campaign had a clear impact on deposit activity: +42% in March and +14% in April. It helped broaden the coverage of EPFL's scientific output in Infoscience and reinforced its role as the go-to reference for institutional reporting.
Key figures from the AAR 2025 campaign:
That said, the data points to a usage pattern that remains largely seasonal — a sign that embedding Infoscience into researchers' everyday workflows, beyond AAR cycles, is still an area to work on.
On the support side, ticket volume dropped noticeably this year (60 requests, compared to around a hundred last year), reflecting growing confidence and familiarity with the platform. A closer look at the requests shows, however, that a significant share involves tasks researchers could handle on their own — which is directing our efforts toward better self-service resources: step-by-step guides, video tutorials, and clearer documentation, so every researcher can get the most out of Infoscience independently.
In parallel, a coordinated effort was carried out with the Institutional Data and Analyticals team (EM-PP-DATA) and the Business Intelligence team (ISCS-BI) to improve the reliability of the data transferred from Infoscience to the AAR validation module, while also enhancing the usability of the interface.
Finally, the campaign contributed to raising the visibility of the ORCID–EPFL integration service. Made aware of this identifier through its presence in their unit reports, many professors and researchers created or linked their ORCID: around 80 new records per month were observed in March and April 2026, compared to about fifteen usually.