Promoting research

 Source: http://www.swansea.ac.uk/iss/researchsupport/promoting%20research/

Get your research noticed

Get your research noticed

Some ideas to try

Universities are increasingly ranked by their research so promoting
it is important. Citation count is one measurement of research ranking,
not a perfect one but it makes up 30% of the score for Times World
University rankings and 20% of QS World University rankings.


Of course, the most important thing is to produce good research and
none of the ideas below are guaranteed to increase interest in your work
but they do work for some people so choose the ones which are likely to
work for you and have a go at increasing the visibility of your
research.


Collaborate

• Collaborate—papers with multiple authors tend to be cited more,
  especially if you can use international collaborators or people with a
  strong reputation in your field. Collaborating across disciplines also
  often attracts high citations. There are some tips on collaborating in
  this article from Science.

Writing Tips

• Choose a good title. Question type titles seem to attract less citations than other types of title. This article from the LSE Impact blog gives some ideas.
• Repeat key phrases in your abstract as this will help search engines
  to pick up your article—though still keep in mind that you are writing
  for humans and the abstract needs to attract people to read on.
• Articles with plenty of references tend to attract a high number of
  citations. It is usually acceptable to cite your own work as long as it
  is relevant.

Finding the right journal

• In many subjects it is important to find a journal with a high
  impact factor.  Our subscription to Journal Citation Reports will allow
  you to find out what this is for the journals you are considering and to
  compare journals for your subject.  Scopus also offer a similar
  service.
• Our guide to finding impact factors
• You could also consider the journal aims, scope, how well known the
  editorial board are and whether it is indexed in the major databases for
  your subject. Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory will give you this information.

Optimize your research for search engines

• Choose good keywords whenever you are given the chance to,
  either within your article or in any repository you put it in. Use
  current buzzwords if these are appropriate and consider how others might
  search for your article.
• This advice from Elsevier may be helpful.

Open Access

• Making your work open access can make it more visible and there is some evidence
  that open access articles are cited more. You can make your work open
  access by paying an article processing charge if you have funding or by
  depositing in a repository. Information on apcs for RCUK funded research
  is at http://www.swansea.ac.uk/iss/researchsupport/apc/
• Make sure you deposit your work in Cronfa
  as that will be required for the next REF. Cronfa aims to make articles
  visible to Google Scholar and other search tools. In some subject areas
  there are well known repositories where you can put your work. OpenDOAR has a listing. There is usually nothing to prevent you from depositing in more than one repository though you do need to check your publisher’s copyright policy. 
• If you have data which accompanies your article, consider making
  this publicly available as that can also increase citations of your
  article. Some information on data management is available in Collaborate.

Promotion

• Take the chance to attend and speak at conferences - some ideas for finding funding. 
  One suggestion is to take along copies of your paper and leave them as
  handouts which may encourage people to read and cite it.
• Try social media as a means of promotion. Although not everyone is
  comfortable with this there is evidence that using Twitter, blogs,
  podcasts and tools like Research Gate and Mendeley can help to get you
  known and increase the chances of your work being used and cited. Our
  guides to social media and social networking for researchers will help you get started.

Your identity

• Use a unique identifier such as an ORCID
  ID to make sure that you can be distinguished from people with a
  similar name. There are other options such as  Researcher ID though
  ORCID is becoming the most widely known. Adding your ORCID to university systems
  will show you how to put your ORCID in the university ABW system.
• Make sure you are consistent in the form of your name that you use
  in publications and use the university name in full as  this can help to
  identify you.

How can I find out where I am cited?

• There are various tools available— Web of Science, Scopus and Google
  Scholar are the main ones. Our guides will help with these:  Who is citing my work: WOS and Scopus
  and Who is citing my work: Google Scholar
  
• You can also set up alerts to keep you informed when someone cites your work. Details of how to do this are in Who is citing my work: alerts
  

Claim all your publications

• It is not uncommon for databases to make mistakes and attribute
  articles to the wrong person or institution.  It is worth taking the
  time to search Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar to make sure
  that all your papers are correct and attributed to you. 
• Keeping an up to date list of publications will help you to keep an
  eye on this. If you use RIS / Cronfa to do this your staff page will
  automatically be up to date but if you maintain your own lists take the
  time to make sure that people can find out about your latest work.

Use the full university address

• It is important that your work can be traced back to Swansea
  University. Using an address such as Singleton Hospital or a research
  group without the university name and address can risk your work not
  being credited to the university when rankings are worked out. 

Promoting research