Written by Karen Clews and guest bloggers Vicky Wallace and Judith Hegenbarth
With the increasing emphasis on knowledge transfer and impact it has never been more important for researchers to ensure that their research is reaching all appropriate audiences, and more importantly, being read by them! At Birmingham the Library Research Support Team and Research Information Manager have been working with academic colleagues to ensure that they are equipped with the right tools to be able to make the most of their research.
There are no secret tricks or complicated rules to follow, just some simple pointers that can help you to get your research out there. Whether you are new to academic publishing, or you are a seasoned pro, thinking about the points below can help you focus on what you really want to achieve.
To start with, we need to consider your assets, and your audience.
When thinking about assets, the tendency can be to think about journal articles, the mainstay of research communication. It is worth writing a range of different article types for different purposes, for example a ‘review’ article summarising part of your discipline is good for generating citations, whilst an article publishing novel research may be eligible for the REF.
Journal articles are hugely important, but it is important to remember other assets that can benefit the research, and wider community; including books and chapters, conference papers, blogs and presentations. For example, a blog post or opinion piece on a website such as The Conversation can signpost new audiences to your work.
Regarding audiences, our first thoughts are often our own academic community and REF reviewers, but other audiences may include practitioners, funders, the broader academic community, potential collaborators and the general public. When developing your publication strategy or communication plan keep your audience in mind. Make sure you choose the right medium for your message, and where possible, use a range of communications to get the work out.
8 simple rules for developing your publication strategy…
- 1. Identify appropriate journals. You may have a good understanding of the key journals in your area, but it can be worth using a range of tools to identify the best place to publish.
- Checking the publications you cite
- Undertaking a topic search on relevant database, and seeing which journals are represented in the search results
- Browsing the publications lists of leading researchers in your field
- Seeking advice from colleagues
Make an informed decision about whether to submit a paper to a journal by checking aspects such as the publication type, the editorial policy, where the journal is indexed (this gives an indication of the discoverability of the journal), the intended audience, how the publication is circulated (print/online, free/subscribed/part of a society membership) etc. You can usually find this information in the author pages for the journal, or you can search Ulrichsweb (available via http://findit.bham.ac.uk), a directory of over 300,000 periodicals.
In the case of peer reviewed journals, it can be useful to view journal metrics, however these should be used with caution. Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore can be misleading as they are based on a mean score, instead it is worth considering other measures, e.g. % of papers cited – this will give you a better idea of how likely your paper is to be cited.
- Consider visibility when writing your paper
There are steps you can take when writing your paper to increase its visibility and hopefully its readership. Ensure you use keywords that are well known in your discipline, and specific enough to describe your topic unambiguously. Consider the vocabularies of other relevant disciplines too.
- Avoid quirky titles, researchers are busy and need to find relevant literature quickly. If you do plan on using a quirky title, qualify it with an informative sub-title. A good title clearly describes the substance of the work.
- Write your abstract so that it encourages people to read the paper. It should accurately summarise the publication, setting out the significance, originality and rigour of your research.
- Give your affiliation clearly to ensure that the publication is correctly attributed to you. You might also be prompted to use ORCID. Find out more about ORCIDs and why they are useful here
- Work with the Press Office to link your research with current news or debate. Is any of your research going to be newsworthy in this country or overseas? The University of Birmingham Press Office can help you showcase your research in the national and international media; through newspapers, online media, radio, television and beyond. Contact the Press Office when you first submit to a journal for consideration to enable them to work with you to prepare a press release and send it out to journalists prior to the journal embargo being lifted. Once accepted, the Press Office will work alongside the journal to make sure that the press release coincides with the publication of your paper.
- Increase visibility through Open Access.
Making your work open access means that anyone can access and read your work free of charge. There are several routes to making your work open access, in the case of journal articles this means adopting
- green –self-archiving a suitable version in the University’s institutional repository, Pure, or
- gold – where the author/institution pays a fee for publication, and in return the article is openly available, rather than hidden behind a subscription barrier.
There is increasing evidence to say that work made open via these methods attracts more citations over all, so if you don’t already routinely make your work open, now is the time to start! Remember, if your paper is to be considered for the next REF, you will need to ensure that you deposit a suitable version of your paper to Pure within 3 months of acceptance.
- Start a conversation.
Now that you have your research output, it is time to ensure that your communities know about it.
Professional (e.g. Linked In) and Academic Networking sites (e.g. ResearchGate and Academia.edu) can be useful tools for letting colleagues and the academic community know about your new publication. Remember to always link to your Pure copy instead of uploading the publisher copy to these sites to avoid any copyright problems with publishers.
Blogging and Microblogging (e.g. Twitter) can be a useful way of engaging with a potential audience, and starting discussions, creating a ready community for engagement with your research. There is a range of academic blogs available where you can act as a guest blogger, again raising your profile and increasing the visibility of your research.
Kudos is a tool that helps you reach your potential audiences efficiently. Explain your work in plain language, enrich it with links to materials that add context, and share it via your social, web and email networks. Kudos metrics show downloads, altmetrics and citations, and maps these against your actions to feed back on their effectiveness so it is a great way to understand the impact of your social media sharing and what works best. In a pilot program Kudos ran they were able to show that publications shared through Kudos received on average 19% more downloads than those in a control group.
- Check research metrics to inform your publication strategy and gather evidence of your impact
Article level metrics such as the citation count can help measure the success of your publication strategy, (the Library has subscriptions to both Web of Science and Scopus), however, be aware that it can take a long time for citations to make their way into the published literature so this isn’t always a quick measure.
Altmetrics, also known as alternative metrics, reveal reach from outside of the traditional academic publishing arena, gathering evidence from social media, blogs, news, and social bookmarking sites. This can be useful in the early days following publication before citations have made their way into the academic literature.
Perhaps check the Altmetric donut for other researchers in your field to get a feel for which communication channels are most effective.
- Collaborate
Citation analysis suggests that who you publish with can affect how much your work is cited. Increasingly, work produced with collaborators, especially internationally, gain a higher number of citations. Tools such as SciVal can help you find other researchers whose publications match your research interests. Talk to your local Research Support team about opportunities for collaborative projects and start developing contacts.
- Use other opportunities
Make the most of other opportunities such as conferences, special interest groups, university researcher events and so on. Be ready to talk about your work and how it relates to the theme of the event you are attending. Use your networking skills to make new contacts, connect via Social Networks, and continue your discussions after the event.
There is a lot of information here and we don’t expect that you follow every step, every time. Of course you are not always going to be able to collaborate with another world-leading researcher and not every piece of work will coincide with the key news story of the week. Instead just pick a few of the tips above and try them out; see what works best for you, do one or two things differently and see what impact it makes.
