How to Maximize Your Impact
There are various strategies, services, and tools that can help you enhance your visibility and the impact of your research.
Create and use an Author identifier
Using an author ID will help distinguish you from other researchers, assist you in disambiguating your work from the work of others, and make it much easier to ensure that all your research output is grouped together.
Build a researcher profile and/or join an academic social network
Building your academic profile online can help increase your visibility, establish your area of expertise, highlight your research interests, and assist you in finding potential collaborators. By creating and managing your own profile, you provide and promote accurate and complete information about your research and career.
As with any online platform, be aware that these are primarily private corporations and data companies and that their interests may be different than yours. Establishing a strategy for how to utilize these tools in conjunction with a personal website or academy-owned tools will provide you the best control and impact.
There are a variety of profile platforms available with slightly different focuses:
A platform to share research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of research, and track the research of other academics.
A professional social network of scientists and researchers used to share, discover, and discuss research.
A tool for reference/citation management and an academic social network that can help you organize your research, collaborate with others online, and discover the latest research. Mendeley also tracks how often citations are saved to libraries as a type of altmetric.
A social networking tool for professionals in all fields. A LinkedIn profile is similar to an online CV. You can search LinkedIn for people in particular fields of work or with a particular affiliation.
Ways to enhance and maximize your research impact and visibility:
- Translate your research papers into different forms of media, like video abstracts or visualizations
- Consider authoring or pitching your work to a journalism organization like The Conversation
- Network and publicize your research on social media and other services such as Twitter and Kudos
- Share your data
- Evaluate and select where to publish (TOP Guidelines are a useful tool)
- Share an early version (pre-print) of your paper (ShareYourPaper.org, arXiv, RePEc, SSRN, bioRxiv etc.)
- Track and verify your peer review work using publons
For more information or assistance, email the Library Impact Metrics team or contact the Open Knowledge Center