Source: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/careers-advice/working-in-higher-education/2169/how-to-increase-your-citation-rates-in-10-easy-steps-part-1

How to Increase Your Citation Rates in 10 Easy Steps

   

         

Increasingly, funding agencies and prospective employers are demanding ever more from their potential researchers. In the past, publishing in well-known international journals was enough. Not any more. The new metric that is being used to measure the status (and arguably the impact) of a researcher is the number of citations of their journal articles. This is really tough on young researchers, especially in fields that either move slowly or at least publish slowly. However, there are proactive measures that one can take to increase citation rates. Here are 10 of them.

1. Publish, Publish, Publish

If your research is only available as a thesis, there are only a few brave souls who will read it. Many students when they finish their doctorates are fairly burnt out. They are tired of their topic, annoyed with their supervisor, and/or focused on their new job and new life. Years of poverty (and possibly chastity) often temper one’s enthusiasm for digging through old data to start new publications. Unfortunately, amongst life’s uncertainties there are only two things no one can take from you. These are your degrees and your publication. Thus, buck up your pride, turn on your computer, and start writing. Do this every day for at least one hour until your manuscript has been submitted to a journal. Repeat this until every piece of interesting data and/or analysis has either been published or is at least being reviewed.

2. Publish Where It Counts

Not so many years ago, the number of “reputable” journals was fairly small. Now the choice of where to publish can be quite daunting, and many of the options currently available are not particularly good. As a simple rule of how to select an acceptable journal is to check that it is indexed in the Institute for Scientific Information (more commonly known as Thomson ISI or just ISI). If it is not, many academic institutions will not consider it as having a sufficiently high impact to be counted towards hiring or promotion. Not all of your publications have to be ISI indexed, but most should. At a minimum they should appear in Compendex. Compendex’s standards for inclusion are not as rigorous as ISI but still much higher than many of the other indexing options (e.g. Google Scholar). Additionally, unless you are in computer science or a few other special areas, a conference paper holds little weight in hiring and promotion decisions.

3. Check the Review Cycle Duration

Another consideration in selecting a journal is its review cycle. You want to avoid having your paper in review for a year and then having it either rejected or spending another year until the revisions are accepted. Determining the length of the review cycle can be difficult, but some journals publish the expected duration of their review cycle in their mission statement. Additionally, you can always write to the editor for this information. As a rule of thumb, if the journal does not have an electronic submission system, the review cycle is likely to be very long. Another good thing about journals with short review cycles is that even if your paper is rejected, you can quickly get it submitted elsewhere.

4. Make Certain There Are On-line Preprints

A related factor is the publication cycle. Just because your paper is accepted does not mean that it is available. It may languor in an “in press” status for more than a year. This is really bad. To avoid this, many journals have now gone to electronic preprints. This means that within days of acceptance the paper is assigned a unique digital object identifier (DOI) and is electronically published. For most major academic publishers (e.g. Taylor and Francis, Elsevier), this is now the norm. Where this is not yet uniformly the case is for journals published by professional or trade organizations. To compound this issue, many of these publications only appear quarterly and can have long backlogs. Thus, an accepted paper may not be published for an additional one to two years. In today’s highly competitive climate, few researchers can afford to wait that long.

5. Publish a Review Paper

Years ago, the top journals would not publish review papers, as they were not considered as original research. This position has changed quite dramatically as editors have come to realize that good review papers are often highly cited. These citations translate to higher impact factors for the journals (a factor on which many authors base their decisions on where to publish; but impact factors are a subject for another day). Thus, review papers are now fairly welcome. While one cannot make a career of writing review papers, one or two well placed ones can help greatly increase your overall citation count. As one’s career progresses these citations become the basis for establishing other indices that consider not only the total number of citations acquired by each paper but the aggregate of the citations from all of an author’s citations.
How to Increase Your Citation Rates in 10 Easy Steps (part 2)

In part 1 of “How to Increase Your Citation Rates”, recommendations were made relating to publishing all that you can, writing a review paper, and investigating where to publish, along with the specifics as to determining a journal’s review and publication cycles. Five additional suggestions are provided below:

1. Use Open Repositories

An open repository is typically a publicly-accessible Internet site that provides a no cost version of the finalized text, images, and tables of published journal papers from individuals affiliated with the hosting body. Most commonly this is a university or group of universities. Due to copyright issues, papers are often not in their typeset format. This will depend upon the publisher. There may also be an enforced waiting period of 12-24 months. The administrator of the open repository can usually advise as to the requirements. Despite these modifications, your research will be freely available to anyone with internet access. Many funding agencies, especially in the health sciences are now requiring that all published output that was generated from their funds is publicly available in some type of no cost format. If your institution does not have an open repository, there are other options such as ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net), which promotes itself as a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. Participating will also enable others to contact you about your papers. Another option is to simply post your cv on-line with hyper-links to non-copyright protected versions or with an email address where researchers may request a version directly from you.

2. Get full credit for your papers and your citations

Due to publisher requirements, the exact format of your name may not appear consistently on all of your publications (e.g. Debra Laefer, Debra F. Laefer, D Laefer, DF Laefer) This may cause confusion for organizations and algorithms that compile citation statistics. There will be an even greater chance that you will not be credited with all of the papers you have written, to say nothing of the affiliated citations, if you have changed your name, changed organizational affiliation, or have a common name (e.g. Brian Smith). One way to minimize this is to consciously select a name under which you will publish and stick to it. If you have a common name, this may mean including a middle initial or name that you do not usually use. If you changed your name, this may mea continuing to publish under your maiden name, even if it is no longer your legal name.
Another way to help the situation is to set up a profile on Google scholar (http://scholar.google.com). The system will also allow you to identify where versions of your paper may appear with slightly different titles, even though there is only one publication. This often happens when a title has a hyphenated word or an author’s name is easily misspelled. Google scholar also gives you an instantaneous way to check your citations. Finally this will assist other scholars looking for one of your publications to quickly check if there is related work that you have published that may also be of interest to them.

3. Publish Your Data Sets

Archiving one’s data sets is simply good practice. Think of it as using cloud computing to the “nth” degree. Datacite and similar organizations can assign a unique digital object identifier to the data. This allows you to increase your research profile and to have something else with which to collect citations. Because of the high cost of data collection, it also provides an opportunity to develop a reputation for high quality data generation, even if others do not agree with your processing or interpretation methods.

4. Let Others Know What You Are Doing

In some fields and at some institutions, sending out press releases is common practice. Even if this is not the case at your current organization, there is nothing preventing you from doing this (however you should probably check with your institution’s press office to see if their approval is needed for such things). Often such notifications lead to small articles in science sections of local and national newspapers or specialty trade publications. Another option is to send your articles to colleagues and researchers in the area. Being an academic is not for the faint of heart or the shy of spirit. Success requires at least some level of self-promotion. So when you have published something of which you are proud, let others know. Send a copy to the top 5 or 10 academics in the area. Perhaps they will ignore your overture, but perhaps not. With email and electronic versions of the paper, all it costs is 15 minutes of your time and setting aside any misgivings. The rewards could be fantastic including being asked to give a guest lecture or to serve as a collaborator. It might even lead to your next job offer. In short, there is simply nothing to lose.

5. When Appropriate, Cite Yourself

No journal reviewer likes to see a manuscript dominated by self-citations, but if you have done previous work in the area in which you are writing, do not exclude your own contributions from literature review, as well as anything needed in the methodology or comparative results section. As a rule of thumb, limit self-citation to a maximum of three references and only include journal papers.