You are on the ‘How to get noticed in the Scientific arena’
In
a world of hyper-production of scientific papers (>1’000’000 per
year) publishing a paper in a high impact journal is not enough to make
your work noticed anymore. So, you need to get out of your lab and start
building your name/image on scientific meetings and conferences. And
your secret is… a powerful presentation either through a poster or a
talk or both. Through this you will start building your network - a
prerequisite for a successful Academic career. People prefer to work and
collaborate with people they know in person, and promote people they
worked with.
a world of hyper-production of scientific papers (>1’000’000 per
year) publishing a paper in a high impact journal is not enough to make
your work noticed anymore. So, you need to get out of your lab and start
building your name/image on scientific meetings and conferences. And
your secret is… a powerful presentation either through a poster or a
talk or both. Through this you will start building your network - a
prerequisite for a successful Academic career. People prefer to work and
collaborate with people they know in person, and promote people they
worked with.
more thoughts on the subject:
Enhancing and promoting the visibility and impact of your research
(adopted from http://www.eecera.org)
Getting a peer-reviewed article published in a prestigious, Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) internationally-rated, Journal is the beginning rather than the end of the process of publishing your scientific research results. An important part of the process of dissemination is an author’s concern for what happens after the research article has been published.
The visibility and impact of your article in the scientific community and amongst researchers, practitioners and policy
makers is crucial in raising your profile internationally as a serious
researcher in the field and thus increasing the possibilities for
getting further research funding and for promoting your career. We all
want to believe that our work is ‘making a difference’ and is recognised
and read. Promoting your work is not self-aggrandisement but is an important part of knowledge transfer. It enables you, for example, to make links and networks with other
makers is crucial in raising your profile internationally as a serious
researcher in the field and thus increasing the possibilities for
getting further research funding and for promoting your career. We all
want to believe that our work is ‘making a difference’ and is recognised
and read. Promoting your work is not self-aggrandisement but is an important part of knowledge transfer. It enables you, for example, to make links and networks with other
researchers with an interest in the same area.
Today, libraries and universities increasingly look at established rating indices to decide on which journals they will spend their budgets. University departmental heads increasingly look for publications in ‘appropriate’ journals to decide salaries, tenure and status of their research colleagues. So, within this context, consider and make use of the following tips for enhancing and promoting the visibility and impact of your article.
Strategies to improve your research’s discoverability and accessibility:
- Publicise yourself; for example, put a message and hyperlink to the article in your Email signature box.
- Write a review. Reviews are more likely to be cited than original research papers
- Think of ways to make it easy for others to access your work
- Promote and present your work at conferences, with colleagues and through your student body.
- Persuade the organizers of a meeting or conference to make publicly available the presentations made at meetings; not just the published abstracts.
- Set up a web site devoted to your work and research projects and post links to manuscripts of publications, conference abstracts, and supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, specimens, and progress reports on the site.
- Ideas travel through networks and relationships. Build on these and be opportunistic.
- Think about ‘repurposing the content’ .
- Use your Facebook account, blogs, and social networks.
- Start a blog devoted to the research project. Also check out ResearchBlogging.org. ResearchBlogging is a site that allows bloggers to not only show when they’re blogging about peer-reviewed research, but also to share that work with readers and bloggers around the world. See: “Why Do We Blog and Other Important Questions, Answered by 34 Science Bloggers” and “Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson: Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.”
- Consider communicating information about your research via Twitter. Twitter provides an efficient platform for communicating and consuming science. For some practical guidance on getting started and some background, see “Twitter 101: How should I get started using Twitter?” To get a better idea of how and why researchers are using Twitter, you might find these links useful: “What is Twitter and Why Scientists Need to Use It,” “How Could Twitter Influence Science (And Why Scientists Are on Board).”
- Contribute to a wiki in your area of work or research. Some examples of research wikis take a look at Mary Canady’s list in The Wonderful World of Wikis for Life Scientists.
- Use free bookmarklet on scholarly articles such as Altmetric, which allows you to track the conversations around scientific articles online Alternative metrics allow users to understand how their work is being used in the online world via bookmarks and links to the article or data, conversations on twitter and in blogs about the work, and various methods of sharing and storing content. Some great sites for viewing these “altmetrics” include Total-Impact, ReaderMeter, DataCite, and the Altmetric explorer and bookmarklet that can be easily incorporated into your browser bookmark bar.
- Register with bookmarking tools like CiteULike, Zotero, Connotea and Mendeley and start a “library” of publications related to your research project or by author and share the research project library with users.
- Consider making your data available through FigShare and your presentation materials available in your institutional repository or on a sharing site such as SlideShare so that others may discover and share your materials post-event.
- You might also consider submitting your content to a permanent, citable archive such as F1000Posters.
- Take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization) tips to enhance retrieval of your research project web site by search engines. Work with your webmaster to make sure your web page titles describe the content of the web page and include the name of your research project. Include meta tags in the page header section that include appropriate keywords to describe the content of the page. Search engines look at this “hidden” content and use it to determine search results page rankings. See “Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness” for tips on how to promote online content.
- Research is not just text and figures. Create a podcast describing the research project and submit the podcast to YouTube or Vimeo. See the Washington University YouTube channel for examples of podcasts describing research efforts. Video is an increasingly important way for researchers to communicate their results.
- Partner with publishers of non-peer reviewed trade or professional publications, magazines and journals devoted to your topic provide updates of research. These publications are used often by policy makers, decision makers, practitioners and providers as a means of keeping current with new developments in the field.
- Issue press releases for significant findings and partner with the organisational media office to deliver findings to local media outlets.
- Provide seminars to other institutions/scientists, policy makers, practitioners to discuss the research project.
- Consider discussing the results of your research with policy-makers and other governing bodies that issue policies, guidelines and standards. See Feeding your Research into the Policy Debate for a review of the pros and cons of sharing research findings with policy-makers.
- Sign up for other social networking sites to increase your visibility and connect with colleagues. Some useful sites are Researchgate, ResearcherID or LinkedIn. Sites such as Nature Network allow and encourage interaction between users. Social network tools provide a forum for disseminating your research, promoting discussion of your work, sharing scientific information, and forming new collaborations.
How to get noticed in the Scientific arena - Pimp your science
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