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Publishing and Scholarly Communication: Promoting your Research

Developing a promotions strategy

Before you start publishing promote your research, it is useful to think about your overall impact goals, who you are trying to reach, and what you want to communicate. You can then use this to develop a promotional strategy that can ensure you use social media more efficiently and effectively by helping you:

  • identify and focus on the most appropriate tools and platforms, and avoid "wasting" your time
     
  • control your digital footprint to ensure social media adds to your professional reputation 
     
  • track and monitor your social media impact to evaluate if it has a positive or negative effect on your overall impact goals

5 Ways to Increase the Impact of your Research!

  1. Publish in high impact journals that enable Open Access
    1. Impact Factor metrics - e.g. Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) - will help you to select high impact journals in your field.
    2. Check Sherpa/Romeo for journals' Open Access policies.
    3. Consult with peers and check the scope of a journal, and if possible publish in Quartile 1 or 2 journals in your field.
  2. Collaborate with other researchers
    1. Collaboration leads to more citations because each author has their own network and collaborators will also cite each other's work in their other projects. Collaboration often leads to better quality research due to the complementary skills of the research team. Co-authored papers, especially those from outside the author's home country, have been shown to be cited more frequently. See this guide for tips on getting started with co-authoring.
  3. Ensure your research is easily identifiable
    1. Create an ORCID profile to ensure that all of your research is linked correctly to you. Link your ORCID profile to your ULRIS, Publons, Scopus and Google Profiles.
  4. Increase the visibility of your research outputs
    1. Take care when selecting and writing your title, abstract and keywords to ensure that your research is picked up in the search results of databases (i.e. search engine optimisation). Deposit your publications in the UL institutional repository to make the most of the open access citation advantage.
  5. Communicate & promote your research
    1. Social media (e.g. Twitter, blogs, slideshare) and academic social networking sites (e.g. ResearchGate , Academia.edu) can be useful for publicising research and engaging with audiences. Researchers should also attend and present at conferences and seminars to communicate the results of their research and to meet potential collaborators.
       

Researcher Profiles

Ensuring your research is easily identifiable is very important and can be achieved by:

  • Always using the same version of your name consistently throughout your career e.g. always use either the English or Irish version of your name but not both, never shorten your name, and always either include or exclude your middle initial(s)
  • When publishing always use the same institutional name variant
  • Creating online researcher profile(s).

There are a number of researcher profiles that you can create including ULRIS, ORCID, ResearcherID and Google Scholar Researcher Profiles. This recorded presentation will explain why it is useful to create researcher profiles and the various online resources that are available.

Promoting Your Research Online

As the volume of publications continues to increase rapidly throughout the world, it is becoming more important to promote your research outputs to ensure that they don’t go unnoticed.

One method of promoting your research is to create a profile on an academic social networking site and add the details of your publications. There are several different sites including Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and the Social Science Research Network. Check out the current users of the different sites and speak to colleagues before deciding which academic social networking site you will create your profile in, or you may consider giving yourself a digital identity health check.

Social media can be useful means for publicising your research and also engaging with your audience.

  • Blogs – write about your research and other developments in your field (www.blogger.com or www.wordpress.com)
  • Twitter – promote your research and receive feedback on your publications
  • YouTube – recordings of presentations or other videos to showcase your research
  • Slideshare – put up slides from conferences you presented to further promote your research activities

Social media logos

Twitter

Over 10,000 scholarly links are shared on Twitter every day. It is a very useful method of promoting your research to fellow academics and also engaging with industry, funders and the wider public. Twitter can also be used to keep up-to-date with emerging research, researchers and trends. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has produced a guide to using Twitter for academics (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/).

The initial results of research have shown than highly tweeted articles are more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles (Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4), e123. http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/jmir.2012).

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