A commercial CRIS product developed by Symplectic (part of Digital Science) that automates the discovery, capture, and management of research outputs and activities for individual researchers and institutional reporting workflows, with strong emphasis on researcher-facing workflows.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A university using Elements as its researcher-facing publication capture front-end with downstream feeds to Pure or to an institutional reporting database.
Is an instance
An Elements deployment integrated with DSpace for green-OA deposit workflows.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A bibliographic database such as Scopus is not Elements, though Elements harvests from it.
Not an instance
An institutional repository alone is not Elements.

Editorial commentary

Elements is built around an automated-harvest engine that searches Scopus, Web of Science, Crossref, PubMed, arXiv, and other sources for outputs likely authored by each researcher, then presents matches to researchers for accept/reject decisions. Beyond outputs, Elements manages grants, professional activities, teaching, and impact narratives. It is widely used in research-intensive universities and has strong integrations with institutional repositories (notably DSpace and EPrints) for full-text deposit workflows.

References

Symplectic / Digital Science, 'Elements' product documentation (symplectic.co.uk/elements).

Also known as

Symplectic Elements

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Elements (Symplectic)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/elements-symplectic" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/elements-symplectic",
  "name": "Elements (Symplectic)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/elements-symplectic",
  "description": "A commercial CRIS product developed by Symplectic (part of Digital Science) that automates the discovery, capture, and management of research outputs and activities for individual researchers and institutional reporting workflows, with strong emphasis on researcher-facing workflows.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/elements-symplectic",
  "sameAs": [
    "Symplectic Elements"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:20",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

View CASRAI adoption →