Source: https://libguides.ncl.ac.uk/impact/visibility

Research Impact: Increasing visibility/ Boosting your citation count

Making an impact and measuring the impact of your research

• Welcome
• Writing for publication
• Where to publish
• Journal impact
• Book impact
• Article impact
• Altmetrics and Article Level Metrics
• Personal impact
• Social impact
• Increasing visibility/ Boosting your citation count

Increasing the visibility of your research

How can you ensure that as many people as possible read your work? Many researchers start their search using a search engine such as Google, rather than an academic database, and there are some simple techniques you can use to help your article appear higher up in the list of results. This is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

• Think about publishing in an Open Access journal
• Make sure your title includes keywords - clever titles may look clever but they don't aid discoverability. Imagine yourself scanning through a list of titles - what makes you pick an article out?
• Keep your title fairly short
• Repeat your keywords in the abstract. Think strategically about SEO when writing the abstract.
• Some journals ask you to provide a separate list of keywords. Take full advantage of this.
• Don't forget to use synonyms in your keyword list.
• Use keywords in headings throughout the article.
• If a separate list isn't required, think about adding a list at the end of the abstract.
• Put links to your article on any social media you use. Keep tweeting about it!
• Include the DOI and your ORCID ID when publicising your article
• Add the article (if allowed) or the details of it to sites such as ResearchGate.
• Attach your ORCID ID to all your publications
• Add your article to the University's eprints repository - search engines regularly harvest data from repositories to add, for example, to Google Scholar.

Useful links

• SEO advice for authors

  Help sheet from Wiley
• Maximising the Exposure of Your Research: Search Engine Optimisation and why it matters

  Blog post covering writing keywords, titles and abstracts for search engine optimisation.
• Get Found – optimize your research articles for search engines
• Your essential ‘how-to’ guide to choosing article titles
• Is blogging or tweeting worth it?

  Blog post on the difference in downloads and citation after active blogging
• Scientists: ignore the rules on writing to get citations

  THE article reporting a research project that found that papers with long abstracts are associated with higher citations.
• Does self citation pay

  Paper on the pros and cons of self citation
• Data reuse and the open data advantage

  Article about the value of open data