Monday, 1 August 2022

Library Research Support: Improving the Citedness of your Research

Source: https://libguides.durham.ac.uk/research_support/evaluate_citationimpact

Library Research Support: Improving the Citedness of your Research

Support for Research Staff & Research Students

Overview - Improving the Citedness of your Research

These pages provide some tips and guidance from publishers, journals, authors and others around key activities which can help to improve the visibility and therefore the citedness of your research. These include:

Increasing the visibility of your published research in search engines and academic databases.
Removing barriers to access, including the reading and indexing of the full text of your research.
Key factors to increasing the visibility of your research and profile.

Guidance from Academic Publishers

Journal Selection

Selecting a journal

Selecting the most appropriate journal, which will reach the broadest and most appropriate audience for your research is essential to ensuring the maximum potential for citation of your published research.

Academics will have differing views as to how to best select the most appropriate journal, but here we have collected some suggestions of things to consider.

For further information and guidance, see our Where to Publish guide for authors.

Titles and Abstracts

Optimising Discoverability: Titles and Abstracts

The title and abstract you select for your article can have two immediate affects on the discoverability of your research, and thus the potential for your work to be found, read and cited.

Discoverability: They can affect where it appears in results lists in search engines and academic databases, based on key words others may use to search for research on that topic and the keywords and structure used to aid Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Relevance scoping: It will often be the first (and sometimes only) part of the article a potential reader looks at in order to make a decision as to whether they will read the rest of the article. The abstract will often be used by a researcher to assess if the publication is of interest and relevance to their research question, and thus how (and if) to read further, and potentially cite the work.

Text-mining and data-mining: Increasingly in many disciplines, the text- and data-mining of large amounts of published content are increasingly used as primary means of discovery and synthesis of research literature. Ensuring the structure of titles and abstracts are also optimised for automated discovery and interpretation are therefore also key considerations.

Author Affiliations & Profiles

Author Affiliation

Make sure that you, and your university and department, receive appropriate credit and attribution for your publications. It is not uncommon for publications to be incorrectly attributed to the wrong author or institution based on incorrect or ambiguous author information included in the original article.

Use a consistent form for you name, and consider carefully the implications of how any change of name (such as through marriage) will impact on the ability of readers and automated systems to correctly identify your publications output.
Consider registering for an ORCiD or ResearcherID.
Make sure you correctly list your author affiliation, in accordance with Durham University Author Affiliation Policy guidance.

Ensuring your university affiliation is included on your papers is particularly important for ensuring your research output is correctly identified and included in citation metric components used in University Rankings such as the QS World Rankings.

Open Access and Social Media

Open Access

[See our Open Research Guide here]

Open access can increase the accessibility, discoverability, and visibility of a research output. It enables researchers to more easily share their work and promote it effectively via online media (as anyone with an internet connection is able to link through to the full text, and won't face a paywall barrier if they don't have subscription access).

Open access publishing can result in increased accessibility because:

Most academic outputs are supplied by publishers, and locked behind a subscription or pay-to-view barrier for most readers. Open Access removes that barrier, making it is easier to obtain, read and re-use an open access article
- Open Access often makes use of standard re-use licences, such as Creative Commons, making it clearer for other researchers how and when they can (or cannot) re-use the content of the article (e.g. text- or data-mining, providing a translation or alternative format, use in teaching and learning activity.
The output is more visible and discoverable because it is available from a number of different sources – not just the publisher’s website.
- Manuscripts in open access repositories are indexed by Google Scholar and other search engines
- Tools like Unpaywall and OA Button will allow a reader to seamlessly identify and link to an open access version of an article at the point they hit a paywall barrier, without having to search for multiple repositories themselves.

Whether publishing your research open access provides a citation advantage is something that is up for debate, however – with some strong opinions on either side of the argument.