Increasing your research visibility makes it more likely:
This page provides some tips and guidance from publishers, journals, authors and others around key activities which can help to improve the visibility and therefore the citedness of your research. These include:
There are lots of ways to increase your research visibility, and we'd encourage researchers at all stages of their academic careers to consider the below suggestions:
Sharing our research widely has a positive effect on our citation impact. Research shows that work that is published open access and sharing it widely will increase citations.
Research has shown that there is an open access citation advantage as open access articles receive more citations than articles published in traditional subscription-based journals
Locally our Research Performance Report shows that UL authored Open Access articles are cited on average 12.5 times versus 7.2 times for Non Open Access articles
Research has also shown that articles deposited in repositories (Green Open Access) have an even greater impact than articles made Open Access by the publisher.
We advise that you
Releasing your research on preprint servers before it's published in a peer-reviewed journal has been shown to increase its citations.
A team led by Nicholas Fraser, a bibliometrics researcher at the Leibniz Information Centre for Economics in Germany, (opens in a new window)recently found that papers that had been submitted to a biology preprint repository (bioRxiv) before being published in a peer-reviewed journal garnered more citations on average than those without preprints. This citations-boosting effect was found to continue for at least three years after journal publication.
Major PrePrint servers include:
arXiv is a preprint server for physics, math, computer sciences, quantitative biology and statistics.
Authorea is a platform for publishing articles, data, figures and preprints.
bioRxiv is a preprint server for biology.
ChemRxiv is a preprint repository for chemistry.
Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.
medRxiv is a preprint server for the health sciences.
WUSTL is a member of OSF, a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration. OSF contains over two million preprints from a number of preprint repositories. Use your WUSTL Key to register for an account.
Preprints is a platform dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. Content on Preprints is not peer-reviewed and can receive feedback from readers
Research Square contains over 25,000 preprints and allows authors to submit preprints and make edit prior to peer review in a journal.
SciELO is an multidisciplinary international preprint server.
SSRN is a multidisciplinary preprint server.
The A-Z of Social Media for Academia : is a really useful and current listing of Social Media Platforms available to you. It's produced by Professor Andy Miah,Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, in the School of Environment & Life Sciences, University of Salford, Manchester.
Cite Hacks are a series of short animated videos created by Andy Tattersall at the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at the University of Sheffield. The videos are to offer a few ideas on how academics can disseminate their research, in new and traditional forms to help improve the visibility of their work. Some of the ideas could potentially lead to extra citations
Make sure that you, and your university and department, receive appropriate credit and attribution for your publications. It is not uncommon for publications to be incorrectly attributed to the wrong author or institution based on incorrect or ambiguous author information included in the original article.
Ensuring your university affiliation is included on your papers is particularly important for ensuring your research output is correctly identified and included in citation metric components used in University Rankings such as the QS World Rankings.
Dual Affiliations.
Full time UL researchers with more than one institutional affiliations should list University of Limerick as their first/primary affiliation. Where research has been carried out in a prior institution but published while in employment at UL the previous institution can be added as a Dual Affiliation.
Open Researcher and Contributor ID provides a persistent digital identifier for researchers.
ORCID is one of the easiest profiles to setup and maintain and provides the most benefits to a researcher. We recommend that all researchers setup and use their ORCID.
ORCID provides two core functions:
Unlike other research IDs, your ORCID iD is universal. It's not tied to any institution or database, and it can follow you wherever your research takes you.
Publishers, funders, research institutions, and other organisations are increasingly adopting or supporting ORCID.
The video tutorial below goes through the step by step process of creating and managing your ORCID
Scopus is a database for scientific, technical, and medical information, with some limited AHSS content. It indexes over 23,000 journals from over 5,000 publishers, and approx 150,000 books and selected book series.
Scopus is one of the main sources of bibliometric data and is the data source for both the Times Higher Education and QS University rankings.
Elsevier automatically generates Author IDs to distinguish between authors with work indexed in Scopus. The Author profiles linked to Scopus IDs show:
If you have several name variants or you have changed affiliation, your publications may be spread over a number of different author profiles and you will need to correct this so your author metrics are tracked correctly.
Check your profile regularly, to ensure your author details are correct and any relevant publications are correctly attributed to you. This is especially important if you have changed affiliation recently. You can update and edit your profile, and add UL as your current affiliation, via the Scopus Author Feedback Wizard.
Always double check that any changes you make are accurate and only make corrections to your own profile.
Publons Profile (ResearcherID) is similar to the Scopus Author Identifier, it is a unique identifier for individual researchers but the difference is that you create and maintain it yourself.
Your Publons profile is the public facing element of your Publons account where others can see your publications, verified peer reviews, verfified editorial board memberships and editor records.
If you register for on Publons you will be assigned a unique ID number that remains the same, regardless of whether your name or institution changes, and can:
More information on how to setup and maintain a Publons account are on our Publons guide
Google Scholar Citations lets authors set up a profile page that lists their publications and citation metrics.
The citation metrics are updated automatically, and you can choose to have your list of publications updated automatically or update them yourself.
You can make your profile public, so that it appears in Google Scholar results when people search for your name.
Set up a Google Scholar Citations profile to make it easier for yourself and others to quickly:
Setting up your profile
You can sign up for a Google Scholar Citations profile:
ResearchGate is a social network for scientists.
The major disciplines represented in ResearchGate are:
You can use ResearchGate to:
Full-text publications you upload to your ResearchGate profile are indexed by Google Scholar. However these are not considered Open Access
Academia.edu is a social networking platform for academics.
Its mission is to provide a system for scientists to share their results, independently of the current journal system.
You can use Academia.edu to:
Academia.edu profiles often appear high in Google searches, so a profile can be a great way to promote your research.
Full-text publications uploaded to Academia.edu profiles are indexed by Google Scholar.
Please note: even though its domain name has the extension: '.edu', Academia.edu is a for-profit company.
Target appropriate journals that are read and respected by everyone in your discipline. You might want to take a look at your own reference list and identify journals that commonly appear.
The scope of the journal is probably the most important consideration when you are trying to decide on which journal to target for your journal article. It is obviously very important to choose a journal that is interested in the type of research that the you wish to publish.
Other considerations include the members of the editorial board, the peer-review system the journal operates and the average waiting time from submission to publication.
You should also consult with colleagues and investigate what journals your peers are publishing in, before selecting a journal to submit your article to.
Impact factor metrics are a useful guide to help authors to select high impact journals in their field (see the Journal Metrics Libguide for more information).
Information reused from Edanz's Tips for Selecting A Journal (Infographic) licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike 4.0 
Once you have completed your research and have it ready for publication there are a couple of steps you can take to ensure it has the greatest impact. Publish your research in journals that have a high impact. Use journal rankings to establish the top performers in your research field and submit your research to them. It should be noted that ranking information should always be combined with judgments based on a researcher’s own expert knowledge, e.g. the credentials of the editorial board and a reading of the journal's statement of scope.
The image below from Scimago shows a comparison of selected journals based on the SJR ranking.
More information on Rankings is available on the Journal Metrics Page.
There are a number of different online tools that will suggest possible journals to submit an article to based on the abstract, title and/or keywords.
EndNote Online Manuscript Matcher: In EndNote Online use the “Match” tab to find suitable Web of Science journals for the title and abstract of your manuscript. The Journal Impact Factor and quartile(s) of each journal suggested are displayed along with links to similar articles from that journal (see http://endnote.com/product-details/manuscript-matcher and https://libguides.ul.ie/referencing-endnote/endnote-online).
JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator): This tool only includes journals indexed in Medline (biomedicine, health and life sciences journals).
Every journal has its own unique process for accepting, reviewing, and potentially publishing articles in their publication. Unfortunately, the most prestigious journals also typically have the longest periods of time between submission and publication, some over a year. Please keep this in mind when selecting what journal you may want to publish in.
Approximate turnaround times for different journals can be looked up at the following free online website: https://www.journalguide.com/
Image source: Diana Bowler. "How to Write for and Get Published in Scientific Journals - Edanz1905..." SlideShare. Edanz Group, 18 May 2011. Web. 09 Aug. 2017.
Open access (OA) journals in every discipline are making gains in popularity and impact.
Authors must evaluate OA journals for impact as they would any other journal. The key point to keep in mind regarding OA journals is that they typically charge a publication fee ranging from €400 to €3000. OA advocates argue that this is a reasonable price to pay to allow your work to be available to scholars around the world without having to go through a pay wall.
The Library has a number of agreements with large publishers that allow you to publish Open Access in Journals free of charge. More information about this can be found in our Open Access Publishing Libguide.
When building a publishing track record it is important to avoid publishing in journals or through book publishers who display unethical practices, such as falsely claiming that your work will be peer reviewed, or displaying fictitious impact factors. these publishers are colloquially known as 'Predatory Publishers'
Predatory publishers take advantage of the open access publishing model and the current pressure on academics to publish. Predatory publishers pretend to be credible Open Access publishers (either imitating well-known publishers or creating their own publishing platform).
They usually target academics looking to submit articles to journals by imitating journal publishers (often known as 'fake journals'), but they can also pretend to be book publishers.
They send emails to academics asking for submissions and promise a rapid peer review process. The peer review process is rapid because it typically does not happen at all. Predatory publishers usually publish everything they receive, which some academics have taken advantage of to expose them, e.g. the famous star wars paper.
In recent years the number of predatory publishers has grown and developing strategies to identify them and avoid publishing with them is important for all researchers.
See the Predatory Publishing Libguide for more information on avoiding Predatory Publishers and check out the video from Think Check Submit
which helps researchers identify trusted journals for their research.