Research Guides: Scholarly Reputation Guide: Promoting Your Published Work

Librarian

Erin Owens

she/her/hers

Contact:

936-294-4567
eowens@shsu.edu
NGL 223D
ORCID: 0000-0001-9520-9314

Subjects: OER: Open (or Free) Educational Materials, Scholarly Communication

Generating Impact Diagram

Source: Toby Green, "Publication is not enough, to generate impact you need to campaign"

Promoting Your Work

Promoting your work can help to ensure that it reaches the largest possible number of people in your target audience.

How Can I Share It?
"How Can I Share It can help you get the most out of scholarly sharing. Find relevant information and practical tools to ensure your articles can be shared with your colleagues quickly and easily." Learn more about the background of this site's development.
SO, ExPOSE - Strategies for Researchers to Create a Personal Brand
Joshua Barham, winner of the 2017 Reaxys PhD prize, shares his “So, expose” strategies to build a personal brand and make your research stand out. (Elsevier Publishing)
Elsevier Quick Guide to Promoting Your Work
Description from page: "Watch the 3 min 'Get Noticed' video or download our Quick Guide and Brochure to find ways to make your article stand out. Think of search engine optimization for your article, promoting your article through (social) media, and how to share your article. Visit Sharing your article for detailed information about the versions you can use. Last but not least, learn how to monitor your article's impact. Article level metrics offers more insight in citation and usage alerting." (Elsevier Publishing)
Author Directions: Navigating Your Success In...
These short guides from Taylor & Francis cover topics such as Using Social Media, Promotional Tactics to Raise the Profile of Your Book, Why Should I Blog and Where Do I Start, Understanding LinkedIn and How to Effectively Utilise It, and SEO & Discoverability.
Elsevier Guide to SEO [Search Engine Optimization] in Scholarly Blogs
If you blog about your research or your field, this guide will help you understand how to make your blog posts rank higher in Google, thus making them more discoverable and ideally increasing readers. (Elsevier Publishing)
How [and Why] to Write a Lay Summary
by Monica Duke (Digital Curation Centre) in collaboration with the Patients Participate! project, 2012
How to Articulate Your Research to Non-Academic Audiences: Four tips to help summarize research
by Sarah Tanksalvala, on the Thomson Reuters blog
Public Engagement in Research (15-minute Podcast)
What does ‘public engagement’ mean? What can researchers gain from encouraging people outside of academia to read their work? And where should you begin? (From Taylor & Francis Author Services, podcast series: "15 minutes to develop your research career")

Promoting a Book

Author Directions: Navigating your success through Discovery and Advocacy: Promotional Tactics to Raise the Profile of Your Book
"Publishing a book is an exciting time for any author. Years of dedication and hard work pulled together into a printed volume ready to share with the academic world. As an author, you know your audience better than anyone. This snapshot will help you put that knowledge into the marketing of your own book, with tips on how to gain a strong online and offline presence to maintain discoverability, even after publication." This paper is free, but the download requires a short registration.
Author Directions: Navigating your success in Book Reviews: Advice for securing a book review in a journal
"Getting your book published is just the beginning. Another important step is raising awareness of your book to a wider audience. What better way to do that than to get your book reviewed by academic journals?" This paper is free, but the download requires a short registration.
Author Directions: Navigating your success with book launches: Advice and tips for organising your own book launch
"After many years of hard work your book is finally in front of your peers and the public. As an author, you may want to arrange a book launch to meet and engage with your audience – who’ll hopefully purchase a few copies of your book! Our resource guide will help you plan your book launch, with advice and tips from Taylor & Francis authors well versed in organising launches themselves." This paper is free, but the download requires a short registration.

Achieving Policy Impact

So you want to make an impact? Some practical suggestions for early-career researchers [societal and policy impact]
-- by Megan Evans and Chris Cvitanovic, 6 Aug 2018, on the LSE Impact Blog
-- "One way for researchers to meet the growing requirement to demonstrate that their work has had an impact is by evidencing the degree to which it has influenced public policy. But for many early-career researchers, the practicalities of how to successfully influence policy processes can be elusive... Megan Evans and Chris Cvitanovic provide some practical tips and suggestions..."

(click to enlarge infographic)

Publisher Promotion Tools

Some individual publishers offer special options to allow authors to share otherwise paywalled articles for free to a certain number of people or for a certain period of time. Below are a few examples.

Elsevier Share Links
"The majority of Elsevier journals offer Share Links. This is a customized link which authors receive for their newly-published article on ScienceDirect. The link provides 50 days’ free access to their article – after that, the usual access rules apply. Anyone clicking on the Share Link within the 50-day period will be taken directly to the article with no sign up or registration required. Share Links are ideal for sharing articles via email and social media." (Elsevier)

The Impact of Social Media?

Opinions and data are mixed on how much social media promotion increases metrics such as downloads and citations.

Pay attention to how much of a role social media discussion of research plays in your field or among the audience you intend to reach, and be savvy in deciding how much (or how little!) time to commit to promoting your work on social media.

Can Twitter, Facebook, and Other Social Media Drive Downloads, Citations?
This concise summary of a randomized trial concludes that the effects of social media promotion on downloads and citations is probably overstated, but such promotion is also probably not harmful.
Create a Social Media Strategy for Your Research that Delivers Real Impact
by Mark Reed for the Maya Project, October 27, 2015.