UCSF Profiles Data and APIs

UCSF Profiles data
UCSF Profiles features UCSF's community of researchers. Here's how to reuse our data in your websites and projects.

UCSF Profiles, powered by CTSI, has current data on over 10,000 members of the UCSF research community.

We make this data available via a simple JSON API (programming required), or you can automatically import Profiles data into a UCSF Drupal site.

  How to use the Profiles JSON API   How to embed into UCSF websites

What we provide

We encourage reuse of our data on University of California and other academic sites. We currently provide the following data from each profile:

About a researcher
  • name, school, department, job title
  • email, street address, telephone
  • photo, ORCID, education, websites, Twitter account, Slideshare
Research and impacts
  • bio, research interests, top keywords from publications
  • publications — including title, citation, URL, top/highlighted pubs
  • select grants — including title, funder, etc.
  • awards and honors
  • global health experience
  • clinical trials, past and present
  • news articles about their work

Data is updated weekly, and some fields are updated every day. Demographic data, publications and grants are automatically kept current.  Researchers or their proxies can edit other fileds in their profiles whenever they want.

What we ask for

Use if for free, as long as you follow 3 simple guidelines:

  1. Register with us, to prevent disconnects
    Before launching tools that use this API, you must contact us, so we can let you know before updates to the API. Join us on Chatter or Slack to stay connected.
  2. List the source, so your users know where to correct mistakes
    Web pages using this data must include the following statement, links intact: "Data provided by UCSF Profiles, powered by CTSI at UCSF." In addition, pages about individual researchers should link back to their original profile if possible, e.g. like this: Sam Hawgood's full profile.
  3. Keep your data updated, to reduce complaints

    If you cache data made available via UCSF Profiles, you SHOULD refresh your data at least weekly, and you MUST refresh your data at least monthly.