Promoting your research work in different ways

The visibility and impact of your article in the scientific community and amongst researchers, practitioners and policy makers is crucial in raising your profile internationally as a serious researcher in the field and thus increasing the possibilities for getting further research funding and for promoting your career. We all want to believe that our work is ‘making a difference’ and is recognised and read. Promoting your work is not self-aggrandisement but is an important part of knowledge transfer. It enables you, for example, to make links and networks with other researchers with an interest in the same area. Here you may promote your research work through different ways

• Publicize yourself through a message and hyperlink to the article in your Email signature box.
• Promote and present your work at conferences, with colleagues and through your student body. Persuade the organizers of a meeting or conference to make publicly available the presentations made at meetings; not just the published abstracts.
• Set up a web site devoted to your work and research projects and post links to manuscripts of publications, conference abstracts, and supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, specimens, and progress reports on the site.
• Use your Facebook account, blogs, and social networks. Start a blog devoted to the research project. Also check out ResearchBlogging.org.

• Consider communicating information about your research via Twitter. Twitter provides an efficient platform for communicating and consuming science.
• Contribute to a wiki in your area of work or research.
• Put your article in an institutional or subject repository.
• Use free bookmarklet on scholarly articles such as Altmetric, which allows you to track the conversations around scientific articles online Alternative metrics allow users to understand how their work is being used in the online world via bookmarks and links to the article or data, conversations on twitter and in blogs about the work, and various methods of sharing and storing content. Some great sites for viewing these “altmetrics” include Total-Impact, ReaderMeter, DataCite, and the Altmetric explorer and bookmarklet that can be easily incorporated into your browser bookmark bar.
• Register with bookmarking tools like CiteULike, Zotero, Connotea and Mendeley and start a “library” of publications related to your research project or by author and share the research project library with users.
• Consider making your data available through FigShareand your presentation materials available in your institutional repository or on a sharing site such as SlideShareso that others may discover and share your materials post-event. You might also consider submitting your content to a permanent, citable archive such as F1000Posters.
• Take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization) tips to enhance retrieval of your research project web site by search engines. Work with your webmaster to make sure your web page titles describe the content of the web page and include the name of your research project. Include meta tags in the page header section that include appropriate keywords to describe the content of the page. Search engines look at this “hidden” content and use it to determine search results page rankings.

• Research is not just text and figures. Create a podcast describing the research project and submit the podcast to YouTube or Vimeo. See the Washington University YouTube channel for examples of podcasts describing research efforts. Video is an increasingly important way for researchers to communicate their results.
• Provide seminars to other institutions/scientists, policy makers, practitioners to discuss the research project.
• Sign up for other social networking sites to increase your visibility and connect with colleagues. Some useful sites are ResearcherID or LinkedIn. Sites such as Nature Network allow and encourage interaction between users. Social network tools provide a forum for disseminating your research, promoting discussion of your work, sharing scientific information, and forming new collaborations.

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