There are some simple but effective strategies that can be followed to maximise the chance of your work being read. Our five suggestions will help you to make the most of the work you create. You don’t need to use all of them to be effective.
Optimise your title and abstract
Increase the discoverability of your publication by optimising your title, abstract and keywords for both search engines and human readers. Search engines give most weight to publication titles. Whilst catchy titles can attract attention when you promote your research via social media, it is better to avoid them in your publication title as searches on bibliographic databases will struggle to find the papers.
- Think about using the keywords and phrases that researchers in your field use to search the literature. Avoid vague or broad keywords or phrases which would return numerous results. If your research covers several disciplines make sure you use the vocabularies relevant for all the disciplines.
- Repeating keywords and phrases several times. Search engines give more weight to repeated phrases, but make sure it reads well.
Use the correct institutional affiliation
Once your paper is published, its details will usually be pulled into one or more bibliographic databases. Databases use algorithms to curate the bibliographic information, e.g. so that an author search retrieves all of the papers associated with an author. You can assist this process by ensuring your name and institutional address/affiliation conventions are consistent across your publications.
- It is vital to give your correct affiliation: Name, Research Group, Department, University of Birmingham address.
- Use ORCID to distinguish yourself from researchers with a similar name.
Decide where to publish
Maximise your readership by making your work openly accessible, avoiding predatory publishers and publishing in a title indexed by major citation services such as Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar.
The ‘Getting Published’ Canvas course provides detailed advice on developing a publication strategy.
Engage with stakeholders
Deciding who your key audiences are will help you to select the channels for dissemination. A communications plan will help you to strategically identify stakeholders, select channels and carry out a promotional campaign. Are your key stakeholders the media, policymakers, practitioners or industry?
- The University Press Office may be able to help plan press releases or similar activity. Contact them well in advance of your publication date.
- Consider presenting at conferences, seminars and workshops, particularly around the time of publication.
- Use social media to reach a wide audience, there are many channels to choose from.
- Including a link in your paper to underlying research data and materials as this will make your paper more attractive. It will enable other researchers to discover and re-use your dataset, build on it and hopefully cite your work.
- Consider using Kudos to help increase the reach and impact of your research.
Collaborate
You may be at a stage when collaborating with researchers in other institutions proves beneficial in moving forward in your research area. You can use the bibliographic databases to identify potential collaborators in other institutions.
- Use Scopus to do a subject/discipline search and then view results according to affiliation. The institution which has produced the greatest number of papers in that area will be listed first.
- You could also think about using Web of Science, filtering results to ‘hot’ or ‘highly cited’ papers and identifying potential collaborators.
Further help
Libraries and Learning Resources offers online training via our self-enrol Influential Researcher Canvas Course and Getting Published Canvas Course.
For one-to-one appointments and bespoke workshops, contact the Research Skills Team in Libraries and Learning Resources.