Research Visibility- Old: Tips to Raise Your Research Visibility

Aim at solving the problem of author’s name ambiguity, researcher profiles ensure your research works are correctly attributed to you which in turn raise the accessibility and visibility of your work.

Notes:

• DO NOT leave your researcher profiles blank.
• Make sure you populate them with publications.
• Researcher profiling tools are not self-contained. Make sure you keep them linked (e.g. you can link up ORCID with ResearcherID and Scopus Author ID).
• Keep your researcher profiles updated. Information on your profiles should be consistent across your profiles.
• Make sure you set the profiles to be viewed by public. Maximize the use of your profiles by embedding the links on your profile of university webpages, CV and email signatures.

Find more about ORCID and other researcher profiling tools at Research Visibility – Researcher Profile.

Deposit in PIRA to increase the discoverability of your work in Google and to raise the visibility of your work.

PolyU academic and researchers are required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings (author's final accepted manuscript) for open access in PIRA (Source: Open Access to Published Research, Research Office).
 

Information on other subject-specific OA repositories can be found at OA Publishing with reference to the “OA Repositories” box.

Build your online presence with social media tools to communicate with local and international audience (scholars and media, etc.)

Blog:

• Communicate your latest work, summarize your research findings and raise arguments by creating blog content.
• Include links to your OA article in PIRA so that readers can access your article without any restriction of a paywall. Do not upload the publisher version of your article as you may not have the copyright to do so.
• Tips on using blog for your research work can be found at How to write a blogpost from your journal article in eleven easy steps by Patrick Dunleavy, Political Science Professor at London School of Economics.

Twitter:

• Twitter allows you to send a short message (no more than 140 characters) to popularize research within your social network – those who are following you.
• Using hashtags, your tweets can also be discovered by those who are interested in the same topic, which are likely to be researchers and policy makers, etc.
• Many researchers also use Twitter to engage in conversations and discussion on conferences and seminars. This is also a good way to stay up to date in the area of your research by following peers.
• An upside of tweeting your work is to increase the ranking of your work in Google search. Besides, a research was conducted by Eysenbach (2011) to study the relationship between tweets and citations, it was found that “Highly tweeted articles were 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less-tweeted articles…”.
• Tips on engaging with scholars on Twitter can be found at How to...use Twitter for academic research.

LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn is a social networking tool which allows you to build a professional profile and connect with peers. You can list your publications and other research outputs, experiences, skills and employment details on your profile. The tool helps you gain exposure in broader communities.

Engage in academic social networking site such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, Academia.edu to increase the visibility of your profile and your works.

The social networking sites allow you to:

• showcase your profile and research output
• create a network with other researchers with the same interest
• circulate your ideas for comments and engage in scholarly conversation
• disseminate your works immediately
• view the download and citation statistics of your publications on the platform

Mendeley is a tool for reference management but built in with functions for social networking. Whereas, ResearchGate and Academia.edu are primarily social networking sites for academics and researchers.

Each of these social networking sites provides its own statistics and/or analytics to capture how your work has been shared within your network and linked community. This information can be useful proxy measures to evaluate the impact of your research work. For example, the frequency of an article being bookmarked in Mendeley contributes to a score in Altmetrics.

Details of each academic social network are shown below:

Mendeley can be used:

• to build a researcher profile and showcase research works
• to curate and share reading lists with others. Discover literatures by browsing others’ public reading lists
• to create and join public groups or private groups (only applicable to invited members) to share knowledge and discuss most recent publications with researchers sharing similar interests
• to get readership statistics for the research works on Mendeley. For example, who has saved and bookmarked your work at the Mendeley library, what country and what discipline does the readership come from. The frequency of an article being bookmarked in Mendley contributes to the Altmetric score of the article

ResearchGate can be used:

• to share publications worldwide and search for millions more publications authored by others
• to connect and collaborate with colleagues, peers, co-authors, and experts in your field as ResearchGate automatically helps you create a research network.This is based on the people you have followed, the subject area of your expertise and the reference list of your works uploaded to the platform
• to post questions for solutions to research problems at the “Q&A section”. Likewise, researchers are encouraged to answer questions posted by others using their own expertise (ResearchGate will prompt you with questions in your subject area)
• to identify your influence on the platform with ResearchGate score. It measures how your published research and your contributions to ResearchGate are received by your peers

Academia.edu can be used:

• to share a permissible version of your research output immediately
• to receive comments and feedback from others at different stages of your research
• to connect with your colleagues (who are already on Academia.edu) and with people sharing the same research interests at your field
• to get the download and page view statistics from your publications and your profile using the "Analytics" tab

It is important to note that there are limitations on disseminating your works online. Academic works can be divided into pre-print, post-print, and published versions. Due to copyright policies of publishers, not all versions of your works are allowed for online archiving and sharing. You can use the tools below to check which version can be disseminated via academic social networks:

• howcanishareit is a handy tool for researchers in the field of STM to check where and which version of a journal article can be shared
• SHERPA/RoMEO is an online platform advising copyright and self-archiving policies of the journal or publisher you publish with

Identify who has shared, discussed and cited your work, and how far your work is reaching. This gives you a better picture on your audience. Comments and conversations on your work can also be shared when you disseminate your work with social media.

Build a profile on Impactstory (one of the free altmetrics tools) to track the online impact of your work. Altmetric Bookmarklet can also be used to track the online impact of an article. Some publishers now provide article level metrics including the number of downloads, citations and altmetrcis at the platform.

Further details can be found at Altmetrics: Capture Altmetrics Data.