5 tips for promoting your research online
As a researcher, you must be working hard for publishing your next research paper. You are spending months after months, meticulously drafting, editing and revising the manuscript of the next journal paper. So, it is also your job to make sure that the right people — not only from your own community but also people from the outside — should read your paper. In this blog, I will discuss 5 tactics for promoting your research to a greater audience.
Promoting your research online is vital if you want a potential broader influence of your work. It will help you in attracting promotion or funding for your next project. Sometimes researchers hire external agencies to promote their research papers. But it will be reassuring for you to know that there are several marketing tools available to your exposer which can help you promote your research work completely free of charge.
1. Write Articles or Blog posts
Writing non-technical articles and blog posts are unique ways of targeting a broader audience and generating interest in your paper. There are many blogs in different research fields and many of them allow guest posting. You can reach out to them and volunteer to write a guest post on your research which will allow reader from other disciplines to learn about your work.
There are also social networking websites like MachPrinciple.com which is specially designed for researchers to promote their research. Any article on MachPrinciple is read by thousands of people who are interested in the latest scientific discoveries.
While writing an article you should also think about the audiences, who will be interested in your research. Most of the audiences of your article or blog post will be from outside your community, sometimes even outside the scientific community. So, while drafting an article, you should keep in mind that it should be interesting to read. Your article should give a broad overview of the research field and explain why your research is an important piece of work. You should put interesting images to attract the audiences and never focus on the nitty-gritty of your research.
2. Make your research open access
An open access research can be found and read by a wider audience and hence will be cited in a greater number of papers. There are Educational Networking websites like ResearchGate, Academic.edu etc. where you can share your work with your peers. Uploading your research in the preprint directory arXiv.org will provide you higher exposure to your research work.
A recent study has shown that most of the researchers in Physics and Mathematics use arXiv.org, ResearchGate, Academic.edu etc. for searching the latest research in their research field. Publishing in a peer-reviewed academic journal will provide a much higher level of acceptability, but recently with the inversion of all these digital platforms, researchers, in general, don’t search journals for new research in their field.
3. Post your research on social media
You must share the link to your research work in all the social media platforms that are available to you — starting from Facebook, Twitter to the professional networking platform like MachPrinciple, LinkedIn etc. It will give exposure to your research work to general people and people will start noticing your work. Use hashtag to tag any important conferences etc. in your research field. It will help others to find your work while they are searching for some conferences.
Even if you think that being active on social media is a waste of time, you should create your profile in social media because half of the people on the globe is now on social media. Thus, who are active on social media can easily find you. You will find that you are getting more engagement to your research article from the social media than the journal website, in fact, the professional networks like MachPrinciple, ResearchGate are specially designed to promote your work. People will start noticing you and your research.
4. Register for an ORCID
ORCID is a unique identification number that will distinguish different researchers with the same name or same initials. Recently while searching a research article by Das et.al. I find out that there are 13 other people holding the last name Das, who are working on the same field. Your name may also change due to marriage-related things. So, it’s important to uniquely identify yourself so that people can track your research.
While submitting your article in a journal, most of the journal will require an ORCID. However, there are many other journals where ORCID is not necessary. Even in those cases putting your ORCID will help you in the long run.
5. Make your data freely available
Publishing your article is not the full story. It will allow other researchers to read through your research work. However, in many cases, people may like to recreate your work and extend your work. Making your data and codes available online will help others to extend your work.
You can use repository tools like GitHub to make your codes publish online, which is completely free. You can also share the figures through different repository so that people can use your figures in their works. This will help you to gather more citations to your research work, and people will start noticing you.
What’s next?
These are some of the tactics that can help you to gather online attention. There are many other online tools available, such as you can send email to a list of people who, you think, may be interested in your work. You can start engaging in different online discussions in ResearchGate etc. You can do a press release of your work. Apart from these, there are agencies who can also help you to promote your work.
I hope this will help you to gather some online attention for your next paper.