SIGEVA (Sistema Integral de Gestión y Evaluación — “Comprehensive Management and Evaluation System”) is the web-based platform Argentina’s CONICET (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas) built to manage researcher curricula vitae, funding-call applications, and peer-evaluation processes across the national scientific and technical system. Developed and launched by CONICET’s own systems department in 2005, it has since grown from an internal CONICET tool into shared infrastructure used by dozens of Argentine universities and research agencies — making it one of the longest-running national research-information platforms in Latin America.
For anyone working in research information management outside the commercial CRIS/RIM market dominated by vendors like Pure or Symplectic Elements, SIGEVA is a useful case study: it is a government-built, free-to-adopt, multi-tenant system rather than a purchased product, and it bundles CV management, grant administration, and evaluation workflow into a single platform rather than treating them as separate systems.
What SIGEVA Does
Functionally, SIGEVA sits across three connected activities that, at most institutions, are handled by separate tools:
- Researcher CV management. Academic and scientific staff register and continually update a structured curriculum vitae — publications, degrees, positions, and prior grants — directly in the system, so the same record can be reused across multiple applications rather than re-entered each time.
- Funding-call (convocatoria) submission and tracking. CONICET and partner institutions run their calls for proposals — doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships, research grants, career-track competitions — through SIGEVA, and applicants submit and track their status inside the same platform where their CV already lives.
- Peer evaluation. A dedicated evaluation module lets peer reviewers (“evaluadores”) and scientific-committee members access application materials, record assessments, and route decisions through CONICET’s review bodies electronically.
Because CV, application, and evaluation data live in one system, an applicant’s existing CV record can populate a new funding application rather than requiring duplicate data entry — the same interoperability goal that ORCID and institutional CRIS platforms pursue elsewhere in the research-information landscape, though SIGEVA achieves it as a single integrated national system rather than through inter-system exchange.
Who Uses SIGEVA
SIGEVA began as CONICET’s internal system, but from 2009 CONICET opened it for other public and private institutions to adopt at no cost, and the platform is now shared infrastructure well beyond CONICET itself. The Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) was the first external institution to adopt it. Institutions that have implemented SIGEVA (with local customization for their own calls and workflows) include:
- National universities such as the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, and Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, among more than 40 Argentine universities in total
- Private universities including Universidad Austral, Universidad Católica Argentina, and Universidad de San Andrés
- Government science and defense agencies, such as the Comisión de Investigaciones Científicas (Buenos Aires province) and Argentina’s Ministerio de Defensa
- International and regional institutions, including FLACSO and Uruguay’s Universidad de la República
Because each adopting institution runs its own configured node while interoperating with CONICET’s, researchers who hold appointments or apply for funding across more than one SIGEVA-using institution can, in principle, avoid re-entering the same CV data at each one — the platform is designed around inter-node data export and import for exactly this reason.
History and Growth
SIGEVA was built and first implemented in 2005 by CONICET’s Gerencia de Sistemas (systems management department) as an internal tool. From 2009 it was extended, free of charge, to other public and private institutions, beginning with UBA. By CONICET’s own account of the platform’s tenth anniversary, in 2015 the system had grown substantially: roughly 49 organizations were capable of running SIGEVA with their own customizations, some 48,000 users were active on the platform, more than 4,500 peer evaluators had participated in assessment processes through it, and over 30,000 transactions were recorded in 2015 alone. A User Committee, with representation from CONICET and partner institutions including at least 23 national universities at the time, coordinates development priorities across the shared platform.
Note: the figures above come from CONICET’s published ten-year retrospective and describe the system’s state as of 2015 — the most recent adoption and usage statistics CONICET has published in detail. Current-year totals are almost certainly higher given the platform’s continued expansion, but should be verified against CONICET’s own current materials (sigeva.conicet.gov.ar) before being cited as up to date.
Governance and Development
SIGEVA is developed and maintained by CONICET itself, with technical development sitting under CONICET’s systems management function and evaluation-process procedures and manuals published by CONICET’s Gerencia de Evaluación (Evaluation Management office) at evaluacion.conicet.gov.ar. Because the platform is shared across dozens of institutions rather than run by any single one, CONICET coordinates ongoing development priorities through a User Committee with representation from partner institutions, rather than dictating changes unilaterally to organizations that did not build the underlying software.
This shared-but-centrally-developed model is different from how most CRIS/RIM procurement works elsewhere: an institution typically licenses a commercial platform (see CASRAI’s Pure vs. Symplectic Elements vs. VIVO vs. DSpace-CRIS comparison) or self-hosts an open-source one, each independently. SIGEVA instead functions closer to shared national research-information infrastructure — conceptually adjacent to a national CRIS deployment, though CONICET does not describe SIGEVA using CRIS terminology itself, and it was not built on a CERIF-based data model the way many European national CRIS efforts are.
SIGEVA in the Regional CRIS and Research-Assessment Landscape
SIGEVA is best understood as Argentina’s answer to a problem several Latin American countries have approached separately: how to give a national scientific-and-technical system a shared way to manage researcher CVs and grant/evaluation workflow without every institution building or buying its own. Brazil’s long-running Lattes Platform, maintained by the funding agency CNPq, is a widely cited regional analog for the CV-registry side of this problem, though its scope, governance, and technical architecture differ from SIGEVA’s and readers should not assume the two systems are interchangeable or interoperable.
SIGEVA also sits alongside, rather than replaces, Argentina’s broader research-assessment conversation. CASRAI’s guide to FOLEC-CLACSO, the regional forum for research-assessment reform, covers the policy debates — over metrics, evaluation criteria, and researcher assessment — that increasingly shape how systems like SIGEVA’s evaluation module are used in practice, even though FOLEC-CLACSO itself is a policy forum rather than a technical platform.
For research offices comparing how different national and institutional systems divide CV management, grant administration, and evaluation, CASRAI’s CRIS vs. institutional repository vs. RIMS comparison and guide to grant management systems and how they differ from a CRIS both provide useful framing for where a platform like SIGEVA fits relative to the commercial CRIS/RIM and grants-management-system categories more common outside Latin America.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does SIGEVA stand for?
SIGEVA stands for Sistema Integral de Gestión y Evaluación, Spanish for “Comprehensive Management and Evaluation System.”
Is SIGEVA free to use?
Yes, for the institutions that adopt it. CONICET has made SIGEVA available at no cost to other public and private Argentine institutions since 2009, though each adopting institution is responsible for its own local configuration and administration of the platform.
Do all CONICET researchers have to use SIGEVA?
CONICET researchers use SIGEVA to maintain their CVs and to apply for and be evaluated in CONICET’s own funding and career competitions, since it is CONICET’s system of record for these processes. Requirements for staff at partner institutions that have separately adopted SIGEVA depend on that institution’s own policies.
Is SIGEVA the same as a CRIS platform like Pure or Symplectic Elements?
Not exactly. SIGEVA covers CV management, funding-call applications, and peer evaluation for the institutions that use it, which overlaps functionally with what a CRIS person record and grants module cover in commercial CRIS/RIM platforms. But SIGEVA is a government-developed, shared national system built and maintained by CONICET rather than a commercial product an institution licenses and configures independently, and CONICET does not describe it using CRIS/CERIF terminology.
Can researchers outside Argentina use SIGEVA?
SIGEVA is used by at least one non-Argentine institution — Uruguay’s Universidad de la República is listed among adopting organizations — but it is fundamentally built around Argentina’s scientific and technical system and its funding calls, and is not a general-purpose international CV or grants platform.
