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Research Impact

Enhancing Your Research Visibility

Here are a few methods that might be useful if you are looking to improve your research visibility.

  • Make use of SEO to increase the discoverability of your works
  • Promote and share your research via multiple social media channels for various audiences
  • Use author identifiers such as ORCID iD or Google Scholar profiles
  • Present, participate, engage and collaborate with other researchers via social media
  • Go beyond just numbers to tell your research impact

Using Search Engine Optimisation

In order to make your research papers more visible and easily retrievable by search engines such as Google or Google Scholar, you can do the following.

1. Create a search-engine-friendly title by:

  • Keeping the title short, relevant and concise.
  • Adding important keywords related to your topic within the first 65 characters of your title. In general, search engine result pages do not display more than 50 - 60 characters of your title.

2. Optimise your abstract by:

  • Including key findings in the first 2 sentences of your abstract as search engine results usually display only the first two sentences.
  • Make use of keywords in your abstract, following the keywords used by databases thesaurus.
  • Repeating your important keyword 3-6 times so as to clearly express the crux of your research - this will help in relevance ranking

3. Provide relevant keywords:

  • When you submit your article, include keywords to help others to quickly search for your article.
  • A good way to identify keywords is to either think of how others would search for articles, or consider the keywords and subject headings databases use, e.g. MESH terms, Scopus subject keywords etc.

4. Links to other sources and articles:

  • Google ranks web based content based on how relevant it is using their automated crawler. The rank can be improved by having more links pointing to and out from your article.
  • Provide links to the full-text of your article either on your own web CV, institution's website, research websites, discussion forums, wikipedia pages etc.

If you're interested to learn more about SEO, read more about it here!

Sharing Your Research

Another great way to increase the visibility of your research output is to share it online. There are many publication repositories where you can share your preprints or some appropriate version of your articles for others to access . This automatically increases your readership and the potential impact of your work. 

Be aware of publisher’s copyrights which limits what you can legally share online. Generally, if you have published your work under non Open Access, you might not be permitted to share the published version of your work online. Do check SHERPA/RoMEO for publisher's requirements regarding which version can be archived in other repositories.

 

ScholarBank@NUS is our institutional repository which captures, distributes and preserves digital research products. Here you can find theses, articles, working papers, technical reports, conference papers and data sets in various digital formats. When your item becomes a part of the repository, it is assigned a persistent URL which you can safely use to refer to your item when citing it in publications or other communications.

The repository is also indexed by Google and other search engines for increased discoverability and use. Find out how you can deposit your works with ScholarBank@NUS here.

ArXiv covers research areas such as physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, quantitative biology and statistics and is maintained and operated by the Cornell University Library. ArXiv accepts submissions of scholarly articles in a variety of formats from registered, endorsed users. Learn more here.

Curating Your Author Profiles

Having an author profile online can help to distinguish your research from others and showcase your scholarly contributions to the academic community. This is one of the first steps to increasing your research visibility. When other academics try to search for your name on the web or on other online systems, they would be able to see a list of your publications and the impact of your work. Taking the few minutes to create, maintain and update your profiles will also increase your chance of securing a grant application from grant funding agencies and increase the chances of getting possible collaborators to find and work with you.

Here are some of the more commonly used author profiles and platforms:

  • Google Scholar Profile
  • ORCID iD
  • Scopus Author ID
  • Publons (or ResearcherID)

Learn more about author profiles at our Author Profiles resource guide page..

Using Social Media

You've worked very hard and your article has been published! Now what?

Here are some tips on promoting your article and maximizing its impact.

  • Consider preparing a media release about your article and contact your Department, your Faculty, and the Office of Corporate Relations to see how they can help you publicize your article through various NUS channels.
  • Contact the publisher of your journal article and check with them what they are doing to promote your article as well as other research published by them.

Communicate your research online
There are a variety of online places you can share your work to increase its visibility. Here are some options you can consider:

  • Figshare - A cloud based repository that "allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and file sets can be disseminated."
  • Twitter - Share links and short messages, keep up with conferences and meetings, and connect with potential collaborators. Tweets can be tracked for altmetric purposes.
  • WordPress - Create a free blog or website with this user-friendly web-based software.

If you're interested to learn more about getting started with social media, visit Prof Harzing's site for a comprehensive guide on using social media in academia here - https://harzing.com/blog/2020/01/social-media-in-academia-introduction