Promoting your articles to increase your digital identity and research impact
Author:
Jon Tennant
Jon Tennant
Authors are undoubtedly the best
positioned to promote their own research. They know it inside out, they
know people who might be most interested in it, and they know the places
to maximise the potential audience. But still, with an increasing
number of publications every year, it is important that researchers know
how to promote their research to maximum effect, whether it is Open
Access or not.
positioned to promote their own research. They know it inside out, they
know people who might be most interested in it, and they know the places
to maximise the potential audience. But still, with an increasing
number of publications every year, it is important that researchers know
how to promote their research to maximum effect, whether it is Open
Access or not.
Here are our top ten suggestions to help
increase your reach and impact! Most of these fall under two
categories: Networking and maintaining your digital identity, and
sharing your research to enhance its impact. Both are important in a
modern scholarly environment, and can help to give you that competitive
edge while making sure your’re maximising the potential of your
research.
increase your reach and impact! Most of these fall under two
categories: Networking and maintaining your digital identity, and
sharing your research to enhance its impact. Both are important in a
modern scholarly environment, and can help to give you that competitive
edge while making sure your’re maximising the potential of your
research.
- Place articles on your institutional webpage or repository.
Many researchers might not realise this, but sharing either a
pre-print (pre-peer review) or post-print (post-peer review,
pre-proofing stage) version of their articles is fully compliant with
most publishing policies, and an easy and free way to make a copy of
your work freely available. You can use the Sherpa/Romeo
tool to check individual journal policies, and then upload a version of
your work to either your institutional webpage or repository. If you’re
unsure of how to do this, speaking to a librarian usually helps! Make
sure that you upload the ‘right’ version of your work and comply with
any potential embargo policies to avoid any complications with
publishers. - Place articles in an appropriate subject repository.
As well as institutional repositories covering a wide range of fields, many subject-specific ones also exist. Alongside the arXiv (Physics,
Maths, Computer Science), there has been a recent explosion in the
number of subject-specific pre-print servers, such as BiorXiv (Biosciences), SocArXiv (Social Sciences), and engrXiv (Engineering).
As above, sharing your work on one of these platforms is simple and
free, and a great way to increase access to your research papers.
There is a lot of evidence showing
that by posting pre-prints, your research accumulates more citations,
and sooner and faster than rates associated with traditional publishing.
Source - Inform interested users on Twitter. Choose appropriate #hashtags to increase the discoverability of your work.
There is some evidence
that posting your research articles on Twitter is a way of generating
increased citations for your work. While social media not be every
researcher’s cup of tea, it is certainly a handy way of promoting your
work, increasing it’s reach and impact, and improving your article Altmetric scores. A useful introduction to social media for scientists can be found here.
Using Twitter in particular is relatively simple, not very time
consuming, and a great way to start or join conversations relevant to
your research.
- Post links to articles on Facebook, and any relevant groups, as well academic networking sites, including your LinkedIn and Google+ profiles.
As with Twitter, all of these platforms provide ways to
increase the readership of your work, which is ultimately what we all
want. Posting it on numerous platforms is a positive way of maximising
the potential reach and audience for your work. That means more
recognition, more readership, and hopefully more citations too.
- Save it to your reference library and promote in the academic network of reference manager sites such as CiteuLike or Zotero.
This will make it easier for others to discover your articles,
and for you to share your work with your peers. It also makes citing
your work a little easier for others. Some of these platforms allow you
to upload PDFs of articles too, so make sure that if you do that you’re
uploading versions that are compliant with publisher policies. Of
course, this doesn’t matter if you’ve published your work Open Access
via the gold route in the first place, which allows unrestricted access,
sharing, and re-use of your work.
- Share your research data and code and increase your citations.
General research repositories, such as Figshare, Zenodo, GitHub and DataDryad handle
a huge variety of data types and might be appropriate for online
storage of primary data and other ‘supplements’ to the primary research
articles. Many of these come with their own DOIs now too, making them
more easily citable, and increases the re-usability, integration, and
reliability of your research.
Research has shown that
by sharing your data openly you also give your work an important
citation advantage by making it more user-friendly and useful to others.
Citation density for papers with and without publicly available data, by year of study publication. (Piwowar and Vision, 2013) - Inform society news outlets and bloggers in your field.
You can also choose to blog about your own research. Blogging can be a
useful tool to explain or expand upon your research for non-specialist
audiences, and to provide additional information and background that
perhaps didn’t make it into the final version of a paper. If you don’t
maintain a personal blog, reach out to bloggers or blog networks in your
related fields and ask if they would like to cover your research. If
you think your research is worthy, also consider issuing a press
release. Many universities and journals have dedicated teams to help
with this, and is worth pursuing if you think your research will be
attractive to a wider audience. - Create a Google Scholar profile and track your citations.
In addition to useful functions like saved searches and setting new content alerts, creating a Google Scholar profile helps
you to track citations to your publications for free, and increases
your visibility in searches. Google Scholar updates your profile
regularly with new citations and as you publish new articles, and
provides additional metrics such as your h-index. - Add articles to your ORCID account.
There are other choices too, including other academic networking or sharing platforms such as ResearchGate, Mendeley, Academia.edu, CiteULike, or Loop. The benefit of using ORCID is
that it is becoming widely adopted as part of an essential toolkit for
researchers, and often a requirement for authors for publication.
Researchers should however be careful with some platforms which host a substantial volume of content that infringes upon publisher copyright,
and make sure they are uploading only content that they are legally
able to do so. By having just one highly-integrated and detailed profile
like ORCID, you can avoid ‘account fatigue’ from manually maintaining
all the different platforms out there. - And, if you feel inclined to do so, update your ScienceOpen profile through ORCID, and track your article- and author-level metrics for all your research articles.
By integrating your ORCID
details with us, including your publication record, we can track
article-level metrics for your research, put it into context of 28
million research articles on our platform, and also enable you to
perform additional functions on ScienceOpen such as post-publication
peer review and building research collections for your communities.
Promoting your articles to increase your digital identity and research impact – ScienceOpen Blog
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