Introducing Research AMP

Research AMP is a free, open-source platform for building scholarly communities, collecting research, and sharing insights with wider audiences.

What is Research AMP?

Research AMP is a customizable research area mapping platform, designed to facilitate collaboration and sharing. It was built with academics in the humanities and social sciences in mind: the platform allows research groups to build their own platforms for building a scholarly community and collecting research around a topic.

The framework for Research AMP was first launched through the Social Science Research Council's research mapping platform, MediaWell (https://mediawell.ssrc.org/), and later through the Just Tech platform (https://just-tech.ssrc.org/). With the support of the Mellon Foundation, SSRC partnered with Digital Scholar to build Research AMP as a customizable platform for anyone to use.

Research AMP lowers the barriers for the dissemination of public scholarship, and fills the need to put credible, accessible, and comprehensive scholarship in the hands of expert and lay audiences.

The first step for creating a Research AMP site is to make a plan for how you will use the platform's features to bring together a community around your topic. Then, you can install the Research AMP and corresponding WordPress plugins and configure your site. You can use Research AMP to create and publish original content, like research reviews and articles, curate existing content, like scholarly publications, newspaper articles, and white papers, and use the tool to build a scholarly network.

The essential features of the Research AMP site are a body of scholarly literature curated in a public Zotero library, and articles and research reviews that build on that literature and present it in an accessible way to your core audiences. News articles and reports are collated through PressForward and presented on the Research AMP site, which is powered by WordPress. Research topics organize the information collected through Zotero and PressForward, as well as any new content created for the site.

Research AMP is a project of the Social Science Research Council (Jason Rhody and Molly Laas, co-PIs). It was designed by Sonja Leix and developed by Boone Gorges. Additional testing, design, and development took place thanks to Mike Dunn and Ashleigh Syphers of Steady Vision. The project has been generously funded by the Mellon Foundation, and was created in cooperation with Digital Scholar.

For a full list of current Research AMP projects, please see https://ramp.ssrc.org/about/.

For a more in-depth look at the history of the program, how research AMP works and how it can be used, see this November 2023 webinar by SSRC program staff: