How to... disseminate your work Part: 1

Source: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/guides/promote/disseminate.htm

Increasing the visibility of your article

When you publish an article, there is much that you can do to ensure that it and your research maximizes its potential within your relevant networks.

What Emerald can do for you

Having published with Emerald means that you are part of a powerful publicity machine. The journal will reach literally hundreds of thousands of potential readers through its online and print subscriber bases.

Build up your own readership and citation

When your article is going to press, send a link to your relevant friends and contacts, notably:

• people in your department or organization,
• contacts through research groups,
• other contacts – people you have met at conferences, seminars, etc.,
• relevant special interest groups, Listservs, online discussion forum, any professional bodies of which you are a member,
• authors you have cited.

One of the ways you can increase readership of your research is by linking to your article from your Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle, Blackboard, etc). This way you can point students directly to your research. The same applies for your own personal websites or e-mail distribution groups. Linking to the Emerald website, as opposed to distributing a full text version of your article, ensures your article receives accurate download statistics. It also encourages readers to explore other articles within the journal that your article is published, enhancing the profile and impact of that journal (and, consequently, your research).
When you are going to a conference, promote your article and the journal in which it is published. (Note, Emerald can provide you with journal promotional materials). You can thus improve your chances of getting your article known, and hence increase your citation ratings.

Choose a descriptive title

The main way in which someone is going to know whether or not they are sufficiently interested in your article is through its title. Make your titles short, succinct and descriptive, as in the following examples:

• "The European automobile industry: escape from parochialism".
• "Relationship marketing defined? An examination of current relationship marketing definitions".
• "Genetic modification for the production of food: the food industry's response".
• "Change and continuity: British/German corporate relationships in the 1990s".

Provide information that is easy to search

Much research information is retrieved online, through search engines, databases and abstracting databases. It is therefore very important that you come up with good, descriptive keywords. These should cover all the key concepts and contexts of the article, including any "buzzwords".

Example

For example, if you were writing an article on e-learning in Poland, you would obviously use the keywords "e-learning" and "Poland"; you would also use terms that were relevant to the type of e-learning which you were writing about, such as "asynchronous communication", as well as activities associated with it, such as "evaluation".
If you were writing about self-management in schools in Hong Kong, you would clearly use "schools" and "Hong Kong", but you would also use words to describe the activity, i.e. "organizational restructuring", "educational administration" as well as buzzwords such as "autonomy".

The golden rule is, think of every likely angle that someone would search on, and make sure that the angle is covered with a keyword.
Once the keyword has thrown up your article, the next search criteria will be the title (see above) and the abstract. The abstract needs to be clear and informative, not just thrown together at the last moment, but giving a real flavour of what the article is about:

• What is the key idea?
• What research methods have you used?
• What are the findings?
• What are the implications for practice and for further research?

Emerald journals require extended structured abstracts. Each abstract is made up of a number of set elements to ensure that all abstracts consistently provide the most useful information. For more details on composing an abstract, see our How to... write an abstract guide.
The title, keywords and abstract are all known as "header" information: they are the descriptive tags which enable the user to see whether or not they want to read the article.

How to... disseminate your work Part: 1