Source: https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/libraryservices/library/services/research/4-ways-improve-research-impact.aspx

Five ways to improve your research impact

1. Publish strategically

• Choose the right journal
  Publishing in high quality
  journals which are read by others within your discipline is the most
  well established and important method of sharing your findings. You will
  target different journals at different stages of your career. To find
  out if a journal is relevant, peer reviewed and also whether/where it is
  abstracted and indexed,check Ulrich’s web, an online directory of
  periodicals, purchased by the university and available via FindIt@Bham.
• Use the right keywords
  If you’re looking for scholarly
  information, on the web, or in a citation database, keywords tend to be
  the retrieval tool of choice.Think about the title of your paper and the
  words you use in your abstract.Does it contain the ‘agreed terminology’
  of your research area; will it be found by other researchers?
• Use the right address
  Publication address
  standardisation will ensure that your work is correctly attributed to
  University of Birmingham. Check the publisher guidelines before
  submission, but include details on department,school, college and
  university address.
• Use ORCID
  This
  non-profit organisation provides researchers with a unique identifier
  and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to
  these identifiers. ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across
  disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries and it cooperates
  with other identifier systems. UoB now has institutional membership to
  ORCID.

2. Monitor and verify bibliometrics

• Understand citation analysis
  University of Birmingham has access to two important subscription databases which provide tools to analyse journal and author ‘bibliometrics’. These are Web of Knowledge (WoK) and Scopus.Both are available via FindIt@Bham.
• Know your Subject Advisor
  Each school within the
  University has been assigned a librarian to support researchers at every
  stage of their career and at every step of the research process. This
  includes advice on bibliographic management using packages such as
  Endnote and Reference Manager, and also advice on how to use the
  citation tools mentioned above. Identify your Subject Advisor. 

3. Be open to new publishing models

• Begin by making sure your profile on PURE is up to datePURE
  is an institutional database which aims to bring together all research
  information from the University of Birmingham in one place. With
  researchers, their publications and projects, esteem and impact all
  gathered together in PURE, it provides an accurate single source of
  information on the research activitiy and capability of the University.
  PURE supports the creation of CVs which will automatically update when
  you enter new publications, activities etc.
• Embrace Open Access - put your work online
  Make use of UBIRA UoBs
  institutional repository and self-archive as much of your work as
  possible, enabling the widest possible exposure of your work.  You can
  check the 'Funders and Authors compliance tool' FACT to
  find out what you are premitted to do. Most publishing policies will
  allow you to archive a version of your work in a repository,usually the
  author accepted manuscript/postprint, so do keep these. Make sure as
  much as possible of the research you have done in the past is available
  online too. This will improve its discoverability and will ensure your
  work is found, read and ultimately cited. A number of studies suggest that this results in an increase in citations ranging from 20% to 500%.
• Go to the Open Access pages for more information on Open Access publishing models, UBIRA and Pure.

4. Be social

• Use social media
  Disseminate your thoughts and findings
  using a blog and tag (keyword) your posts appropriately to garner
  maximum hits on search engines. Use hashtags effectively to help people
  find your tweets and broaden your network of followers. Kudos is one useful tool for describing your research in lay terminology, disseminating it and seeing how many mentions you generate.
• Use academic and professional social networks
  Register with services such as Academia.edu and LinkedIn and follow other people in your field. They will also begin to follow you.
• Update the web
  Periodically check that your personal webpages, including your publications lists, are current.
• Remember to raise your profile retrospectively
  If you are just beginning to make use of social media, don’t forget to mention work you have already done.
• Engage in conversation
  Don't be tempted to simply promote your work; also take part in debate with your followers.

5. Manage your research data

• Consider your file naming conventionsIdeally filenames
  should allow you to identify the content of the file without opening it.
  Think about using version information, and the ordering of the elements
  within a filename, e.g. YYYMMDD allows chronological ordering of the
  files.
• Back up your data
  Make multiple copies. Keep copies in
  different places, and automate the process where possible. This will
  save time and mitigate against data loss due to accident or incident.
• Complete a Data Management Plan (DMP)
  This will help you
  to consolidate your requirements and plan processes for protecting the
  data and preserving the data for future use. You may also be required to
  do this by your research funder.
• Describe your data using metadata
  Adding details of your
  data to PURE will enable the metadata to be generated automatically and
  harvested by search engines. Effective metadata will help other users to
  find your data, and can result in increased use of your data, and
  citation of your work, increasing your research impact.
• Compile documentation to support users of your data
  This
  will ensure that your data is given appropriate context inclusing who
  created it, when and why, description of the item, methodology and
  methods, units of measurement, definitions of jargon, acronyms and code
  and references to related data. All of this will enhance the usability
  of your data and increase its impact.
• Share your data
  Storing your data in a repository and
  linking it to your research outputs will allow other researchers to
  verify the work you have done, enable them to build on your work and
  enhance your academic reputation.

Library Services offers an introductory online course in Research Data Management



Five ways to improve your research impact