Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A UK university running Pure to power its public research portal and to produce its REF 2021 submission.
- Is an instance
A Pure deployment integrated with the institutional repository so that publications added in Pure are automatically deposited.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Pure is not an institutional repository — though it often integrates with one.
- Not an instance
Scopus itself is not Pure, though Pure ingests data from it.
- Not an instance
'Pure gold' open access (an unrelated publishing-model term) is not this product — see pure-gold-journal for that concept.
Editorial commentary
This entry is about Elsevier’s Pure research-information-management (CRIS) product specifically — not the unrelated “pure gold” open-access publishing model, and not a generic use of the word “pure” as in purity/reagent grade. If you were looking for the open-access licensing concept, see pure-gold-journal instead.
Pure offers automated harvesting from Scopus, Web of Science, Crossref, Embase, and PubMed; an authorial-claim workflow whereby imported publications appear in a researcher’s claim queue; bibliometric integrations; REF/ERA/related-assessment modules; and a public-portal layer with researcher and unit pages. Customers can extend Pure through the API and through configurable workflow rules. Pure is widely deployed across UK, EU, Australian, and North American universities.
Origin and ownership
Pure was originally built by Atira A/S, a Danish software company, before being acquired by Elsevier in 2012 and folded into Elsevier’s Research Intelligence portfolio alongside Scopus and SciVal, which is part of why Scopus/Elsevier bibliometric data integrates especially tightly with it.
How Pure differs from its closest CRIS peers
Pure and DSpace-CRIS both implement the same broad CRIS function — aggregating people, projects, funding, and outputs — but differ sharply in licensing and architecture: Pure is closed-source, vendor-hosted or vendor-managed software with tight Scopus/SciVal integration; DSpace-CRIS is open-source and typically self-hosted, combining repository and CRIS in one codebase. Symplectic Elements (owned by Digital Science, a Springer Nature affiliate) is Pure’s closest commercial competitor and takes a narrower “publications and activity” focus rather than Pure’s fuller entity model. See the CRIS vendor comparison for a fuller side-by-side.
References
- Elsevier, ‘Pure: Research Information Management System’ (elsevier.com/research-intelligence/pure).
Also known as
Pure CRIS
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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