IBIS – your author self-promotion toolkit
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Based on our publisher’s, Wiley, author toolkit, drawing on blog posts from Wiley Exchanges and our own community knowledge of what works for our authors.
See also Wiley’s Maximise the impact of your published research
Your science is meaningless if no-one reads it and, in our increasingly online world, you can play a huge role in promoting your own paper once it is published. Here are a variety of suggestions to help you increase the visibility of your paper and you as a scientist and to ensure that your paper gets read.
Most online activity is now measurable and many online links to your research article (e.g. on social media platforms, on blogs) will contribute to your papers’ Altmetric Attention Score as well as promote your work more widely.
Social media
- Share your article URL on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social media platform you are on.
- Engage with others (co-authors, host institutes, funding body, publisher, linked societies) about your article by mentioning them in tweets and posts.
See also –
Social Media: bringing it all together – links to BOU social media content
How social are ornithologists?
The role of social media in ornithology
Making social media and the web work for you (#theBOUblog)
Which social media platform (#theBOUblog)
5 tips for promoting your research through Facebook (Wiley Exchanges blog)
The power of a hashtag: Twitter tools you need to know about (Wiley Exchanges blog)
Blogging
- If you have your own blog, then write a post about your work and include a direct link to your paper (link to either the abstract or the full paper Open Access, on the publishers website).
- Ensure your blog is listed with Altmetric (see here) otherwise it won’t contribute to your attention score.
- Write a post for the #theBOUblog. IBIS authors will be sent information about how to do this when your paper is accepted for publication.
- The BOU blog receives over 30,000 page views per annum. Of course, other dedicated ornithology or ecology blogs are available and most are already linked to Altmetric and have a wide readership.
See also –
The benefits of blogging about your research (#theBOUblog)
How to promote your research through blogging (Wiley Exchanges blog)
- Email colleagues and network contacts with details and a link to your new paper.
- Take advantage of any relevant email newsletters sent out through your institute or society.
- Add a link to your email signature directing people to your most recent paper or research page.
Online
- Use apps such as SlideShare to share your article with other researchers.
- Create a short video to host on YouTube promoting your paper.
- Create a podcast promoting your paper.
- Update your own institute/faculty webpage linking to your paper,
- Find related Wikipedia pages and add a reference to your paper.
- Register for your unique ORCID author identifier and add details of your article to your profile.
- Pick one or two online platforms to host an online profile (e.g. Google scholar or ResearchGate, others are available).
- WARNING! Be careful about posting any version of a paper on any website (personal website, ResearchGate, etc). Check your contract for each paper to ensure you are not breaking your publishing agreement with any publisher.
See also –
About ORCID
Search Engine Optimization
- Ensure that use your paper’s direct URL to link to from all social media, blogs and websites you have access to.
- Encourage colleague and network contacts to link to your paper.
- Use Kudos to promote your paper and improve its online discoverability.
- Optimize your abstract so it is more discoverable by search engines (see below).
See also –
About Kudos
What do you mean you ‘don’t know how to optimize your paper for SEO?!’ (#theBOUblog)
How to promote your work using ‘off-page’ SEO (Wiley Exchanges blog)
Publicity
- Ask your institute’s publicity/media team to send out a press release.
- Work with the publisher over any such releases so you comply with their publicity guidelines.
- Work with your publisher on promoting your paper.
- Highlight with the editor(s) if you think it is particularly newsworthy for them to take up with the publisher
See also –
How to judge the news value of your paper
Conferences
- Submit your work to be presented in oral and poster programmes.
- Make sure you include social media tags (for yourself and your institute) on opening slides and posters.
- Conferences are also a great networking opportunity to not only inform about your work but to look for engagement and collaboration opportunities.
- Tweet and engage online when at a conference
- If the conference don’t include social media tags on name badges, just write yours on nice and big for people to see!
See also –
How to become a master presenter
How to make the most of conferences
Networking for young scientists – how to do it and why you should
Twitter #masterclass 8 – conference tweeting (#theBOUblog)