Univ. Launches New Research Site

With the goal of making research at the University more accessible to its Internet visitors, Harvard launched a new website last month.

Entitled “Reasearch Matters,” the site will serve as a “gateway” to University research and researchers for the 750,000 outsiders who visit the Harvard home page each month.

Research Matters is “Harvard’s biggest and most easily updated publication,” according to webmaster Elaine Benfatto who oversaw the development of the new site.

Since its launch, Research Matters (www.researchmatters.harvard.edu) has attracted between 8,000 and 20,000 per day, Benfatto says. A link from a recent USAToday article attracted 55,000 visitors in one day, she says.

Organized into six broad categories—mind, body, society, earth, space and technology—the website is written to address the interests of the general public and is “not comprehensive and not meant to be scholar-to-scholar,” University spokesperson Joe Wrinn says.

The site is also searchable by research topic, researcher or research institute.

The summaries of research findings are written to “translate and simplify research,” says Research Matters Content Editor John Lenger, yet they sometimes link to more specialized publications such as Focus, the bi-monthly newspaper of Harvard Medical, Dental and Public Health Schools, which is “written for doctors.”

Research Matters contains 235 articles and is designed—using links between related articles—to make connections by drawing connections between contemporary stories in publications like the Harvard Gazette and recent research, said Benfatto.

For instance, the website currently highlights a recent Gazette story explaining the research of husband-and-wife scientists Sara Lewis of Tufts University and Thomas Michel of the Harvard Medical School. It explains their recent discovery of how fire flies light up using the same gas that regulates blood pressure in humans.

As part of the launch of the website, the University sent out a glossy magazine to 5,000 government agencies that offer research funding to the University, alumni, donors and high school guidance offices to promote the site and attract attention in both the government and among high schoolers, Wrinn said.

The oversized magazine offers a preview of the site and describes its content as “current and groundbreaking discoveries from faculty researchers across Harvard University.”