10 clever tips for promoting your research online
, 15th November 2016
Promoting your
research online is vital if you need to provide evidence of the online
engagement for your work, particularly when applying for promotion or
tenure and funding. In this post I’ll be sharing the tips as well as the
tools you’ll need to spread the word about your work and efficiently
manage your online reputation.
1. Put together a strategy
Like all good plans it’s best tostart by thinking about who you want to reach! Begin by thinking about
which researchers and other audiences will be interested in your work;
the disciplines they work in and where they can be found. Are they
within your institution, or somewhere further afield?
Next think about the channels that
you will use to promote your research to your audience. It can be a good
idea to start by looking at the channels that other researchers
publishing in your field have used to get their work noticed. An easy
way to do this is to use the Altmetric Bookmarklet,
a free downloadable plugin for your
internet browser. The bookmarklet enables you to click through to the
Altmetric details page for any article that has been tracked by
Altmetric. You can then browse mentions from all of the sources to see
who is talking about the paper, where they are sharing it, and why.
2. Write a summary
You might want to consider writing aplain English summary of your work, focused on making it more accessible
to a wider audience. This will provide a good lead in to your research
and encourage more people to read your paper.
You could then post the summary to online discussion groups and forums that you think might be interested in your work:
Or, if you’d rather go that extra
mile, why not put together a short video summarising your work and
sharing it to websites such as Wesharescience.com:
3. Make your data available
Publishing an article doesn’t tellthe full story of your research! You can make, images, files and other
outputs associated with it available through a digital repository such
as Figshare.
By uploading your research you can also assign it a unique identifier,
making it much easier for people to cite and for services like Altmetric
to track engagement for!
4. Get social!
Post links to your work via anysocial media accounts you have. You could also focus your promotion
around any significant events that are happening, such as conferences
that may be interested in your research topic, by using the event’s
hashtag. This may spark a discussion around your work!
As well as using your own social profiles you may find you get more engagement from using your department’s accounts.
5. Start a blog
Think about starting your own blog and posting about your work.You could also look into contacting some established bloggers that are
writing about your subject area (easily identifiable via the Altmetric
details pages for other publications in your field!)
, or anyone who has big following on
Twitter that may be interested in posting about your work. It’s worth a
try and could give you a boost in readers as well as getting your work
talked about.
6. Link out from your email signature and profiles
It might seem obvious, but adding alink to your work to your email signature is a must! By doing this you
are ensuring that your contacts are kept up to date with your latest
research.
7. Use your Research Office
If you feel your work could benefitfrom an extra promotional push why not visit your Research Office, as
they may be able to help your research get seen by a wider audience.
They might have access to channels
such as email lists, or have contacts that could be used to get your
research noticed by news outlets or government agencies. Having your
research mentioned on higher profile websites will increase your
readership and look great on future applications.
Providing the research office with
some key points of why your work matters and what the key outcomes were
can be particularly useful here – and help them build a pitch for a
broader audience.
8. ORCID ID
Register for an ORCID IDso that you have a unique identifier which will tie you to your work
and distinguish you from other researchers. It’s easy and free and will
come in useful for any manuscript or grant submissions. It’ll also make
it much easier to ensure you get the credit you deserve for all of your
research outputs!
9. Make your research open
Having your work freely available toread will mean that your research may reach a wider audience and see a
higher level of citations. There are two options for publishing Open
Access: you can either deposit your work in an Open Access Repository
(Green) or publish in an Open Access journal (Gold). If you would like
to publish your research in this way visit your Research Office who will
be able to advise on the best course of action.
Preliminary studies
have shown that OA articles get more attention online than those
published behind a paywall, and it makes sense! Chances are people are
more likely to share or talk about something their followers will be
also able to access.
10. Unique Identifiers
Make sure that whenever you mentionyour research online you use or link to a page that includes your work’s
unique identifier, this can be a DOI, arXiv ID or PubMed ID. This is
vital to ensure that your work is tracked by us at Altmetric so that you
can keep on top of the conversations surrounding your research.
If you’d like to read more about promoting your research online why not download our ‘Tips & tricks: promoting your research online’ guide or if you have any promotional tips you’d like to share for please post them in the comments section below.
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10 clever tips for promoting your research online – Altmetric
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