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1. Faculty Activity Reporting will be used institutionally only for annual reviews. Please focus on updating your information for the previous two years. You do not need to enter your entire CV. Reports will be made on annual activity, not across your entire career. We highly recommend that you have your most recent CV with you when you work on FAR to cross-check that information is reflected there. Again, we suggest focusing only on the latest two years.
2. We estimate 1-4 hours for each faculty member to enter and clean their information in the rollout period. While most information has already been imported from Digital Measures, there were entries that did not have a one-to-one correspondence. Please know that you will need to spend some additional time doing data cleaning – but only in the this first year.
3. Why do I see “1965” in the term date? Digital Measures required that you enter Month-Day-Year. In Interfolio, all entries will be entered using only Fall-Spring-Summer-Year. “1965” is the code for an empty field that Digital Measures did not have. You simply need to update it to the year in which the work was performed.

Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR) is the system by which faculty communicate their accomplishments each year across scholarship/creative activity, teaching, and service. It serves for faculty to make their activities visible and for faculty leadership to develop a full picture of faculty contributions at scale. As just one example, the category of fellowships, honors and awards will serve as a single source of information so that various groups on è����Ƶapp can amplify faculty successes (e.g., the Director of Faculty Awards, Development and External Affairs, the Office of the Provost, and unit-level marketing and communications teams). Faculty will no longer have to communicate their accomplishments to multiple audiences. In addition, FAR provides a systematic approach to the annual review process, which informs merit recommendations and professional development planning.

Major changes include the following:

1. Simplifying data entry into fall/spring/summer instead of day/month/year.
2. Reducing the number of overall required fields.
3. Providing more auto-loading of information by connecting with more search engines for auto-identification and auto-entry of scholarship and external funding.
4. Adding activity classifications aligned with university strategic goals (e.g., community engagement, international activity).
5. Providing a standard window for entering data.
6. Providing direct access to the vendor for ongoing support.

Regular uploads of the following are provided for all faculty using PeopleSoft (my.smu.edu), the official system of record:

• Courses taught with enrollment numbers and terms.
• Basic profile information such as professional contact information, rank, degrees awarded, etc.
• Many types of scholarship that are accessed through publicly available sites.

No, course evaluations at è����Ƶapp are shared only between the faculty member and any relevant faculty leadership members (e.g., chairs, deans, provost) or authorized peer review committee members during the faculty promotion process. They are inside a separate system called EvaluationKit and are not loaded into FAR.

The University-wide deadline for reporting activities from the previous calendar year is February 1st. Schools, colleges or departments might require earlier deadlines.

There are eight categories that cover various aspects of teaching, scholarship, service, and institutional requirements. Add any information in these 10 areas that pertains to you. There are two categories labeled “Institutional.” Both of these are required. For the seven additional categories labeled as “Other,” check with your school or college to determine if these are required within your area, as they are not required at the university-wide level.

Please check with your unit for more information about possible earlier deadlines or additional required information.

Please note that the basic information required in the above categories is needed for making merit recommendations. The annual review cycle and the merit recommendations will be impacted by incomplete information.

Effective January 2025, è����Ƶapp Policy 1.23 Conflict of Commitment stipulates that all faculty provide information about any potential conflicts of commitment that might need review. Similar to reporting on financial conflicts of interest that is required among a designated group of faculty and staff, reporting annually on “Outside Activities” is now a requirement across all è����Ƶapp employees. Faculty will use the FAR system to make their annual general disclosure by answering several yes/no questions related to potential sources of conflict of commitment. Any possible conflicts will be reviewed, and a potential management plan will be discussed with the faculty member.

It is highly recommended that faculty maintain their own record of accomplishments. Staff job descriptions do not typically include serving as proxies for faculty activity reporting.

There may be two types of incorrect information in the system:

1. Information that has been auto-populated from my.smu.edu. For this type of information, you must reach out to the faculty administrators or staff in your area who maintain this information in my.smu.edu (e.g., course schedules, degree information, office location). The information cannot be changed in FAR; it must be corrected in the official system of record by the unit most proximal to you. Weekly data loads from my.smu.edu to FAR will ensure the corrected information.
2. Information that was transferred from the former system (Digital Measures) into the new system (). We anticipate that there will be a “clean-up” period, during which you will need to make some adjustments to your information. There will be regular information sessions and touchpoints to provide you support during this period. The reasons for the need to clean transferred information range widely, with the most common reason due to gaps or empty data in the originating Digital Measures files.

Each school/college has the option to create its own institutional vita, which is determined by the leadership within that unit. Similarly, the University has an institution-wide template that draws upon the five main categories listed above. These templates are used for purposes such as discipline-specific compliance reporting, external communications, and internal information-sharing. Faculty can create their own personalized vita template and vita, per the .

Faculty have the option to toggle many aspects of the FAR report for privacy settings; also, as of fall 2025, è����Ƶapp has opted not to participate in the webpage integration function of Interfolio. For more information how to toggle privacy functions, either email interfolio-support@elsevier.com or participate in the 45 minute course described on the .