Increasing Your Visibility
For people to read your work and find links leading to your publications, you need to find ways to increase your visibility online. First, you can start by updating your profiles and ensuring that they contain all your recent work. For example, if you have a personal page at the institute where you work, you can start by updating your recent publications there. Also, if your CV is available online, updating it may be a good idea to keep your published work section up to date. It is important to stay involved with social media, with billions of people going on apps, such as Instagram and Twitter, daily. By becoming savvy by tagging universities, societies, institutions, publishers, and peers, you increase your chances of being noticed. Do not dissipate your presence by joining too many social media platforms at once and finding it hard to keep up with all of them. Find the platform that suits you best and establish an active profile that will extend your reach. Second, presenting at conferences relevant to your publication and networking with other people involved with similar work creates new opportunities for future collaboration and allows you to spread word about your work in circles that are interested in your expertise.
Outside of in-person conferences, you can expand your networking circle on websites like Facebook and LinkedIn by directing people to your published work. If you created a poster for a conference where you presented, sharing that poster and using the visuals to direct people to your other work may be worthwhile. Additionally, writing a lay summary helps expand the reach of your work to people who may not have expertise in your research’s topic and are interested in reading more about it. Technical jargon in a summary may be helpful depending on your audience, but providing a lay summary for the general public helps increase your visibility beyond small circles. Finally, an easy way to gain institutional support is by creating and connecting with people on ORCID iD or other research-focused websites to increase your discoverability and manage all your research work in one place (Elsevier, 2020).
Submitting an article manuscript to a journal that is not relevant to your research will only result in an automatic desk rejection from the Editor(s)-in-Chief. As these journals are receiving hundreds of submissions, even a desk rejection can take time to process, leaving the author waiting weeks for their manuscript to be rejected right from the start. Submitting manuscripts to irrelevant journals only ends up wasting your time and effort, as well as the time and effort of the journal’s editorial board.
Gaining Institutional Support
If you are part of an institution, such as a university or a nonprofit, it is helpful to use that institution to elevate your work and support your published work. There are more than a few ways to do this, depending on the institution. Recommending your publication to your library might be a great way to ensure that colleagues and students have access to your work and are able to cite it in their own research. By contacting the library, you can find out the best way to go about sharing your work in the library.
Another way to spread your work in an academic institution is recommending the publication to colleagues and students. Many publishing companies offer discounts upon publishing with them, and you may be able to share a discount code with colleagues and students who may be interested in reading about your work. To spread your work amongst students, it is sometimes useful to adopt your work into a course if it is sufficiently relevant to the topic. You could do this by including the publication in the course syllabus or recommending it as supplemental reading. For all types of institutions, there is usually a marketing or public relations department that would be willing to share your work with other people and advertise it as one of the institution’s successes. In addition, if there are applicable awards that you are applying for or any awards you are getting for your publication, your institution will likely be happy to spread word about your valuable work’s success and help with the application process if needed. Publication reviews typically help with the award process and spreading the word about the work in general. As an expert in the field, you might want to consider reaching out to colleagues and asking them to provide a statement of impact regarding your work. You can do this by putting the colleagues in contact with representatives from your publication company (Felty, 2022).
Start Blogging
Blogging is a great way to reach an audience that’s usually outside of the professional scope of your personal expertise field. For example, people may want to read more about COVID and other diseases but may not understand the intricacies of the biological mechanisms underlying diseases. Therefore, by starting a blog, you will be able to translate your published work into a more readable format. This could be done by posting to your own blog, posting on your publisher’s blog, or sending out pitches to multiple blog sites. The important thing to do is to familiarize yourself with your audience. Generally, people are inclined to pay more attention to an engaging story or a clear relevance to today’s society or a news story. Although the blog post may be a way to bring attention to your published work, try not to be too blatant about the work. Simply give the reader a preview of your work and have them look forward to reading more of your work (Hinz, 2021).
Bookstores and Book Tours
eContent Pro offers services to ensure that you find the right publication and journal to spread your work. A major step in getting your work published and ensuring a smooth process during publication and after is selecting the most suitable and relevant journal for your specific work. If you don’t have all the information on which publications work best for your manuscript, then that could result in a negative experience. To help ease the journal selection process, eContent Pro provides users a free Journal Finder service that identifies up to five relevant journals in the field of expertise of the publication. Utilizing this free Journal Finder service will save you time and stress. The service will also help you avoid submitting your work to suspicious or predatory journals, which may lead your results in the research to being blacklisted. By using this service and applying the techniques above, you ensure your publication’s far reach to experts in the field all over the world.
Make sure your manuscript is ready to be indexed by utilizing any of eContent Pro's quality-assuring services to aid in polishing your work and ensuring you’re on track to acceptance. Get started today by uploading your document or contacting customerservice@econtentpro.com directly.
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REFERENCES
- Elsevier. (2020, Dec.). How to get your research published . . . and then noticed. Elsevier. https://www.elsevier.com/?a=91173
- Felty, M. (2022, Feb. 28). How to best promote your work after publication. IGI Global. https://www.igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/best-promote-your-work-after/5091/
- Hinz, A. (2021, Aug. 25). 5 ways to promote your academic book. DeGruyter. https://blog.degruyter.com/how-to-promote-your-academic-book/
