Effective Research Publishing: Open Research & Open Access: Sharing your Material

- Collaborate - papers with multiple authors tend to be cited more, especially if you can use international collaborators or people with a strong reputation in your field. Collaborating across disciplines also often attracts high citations.

- Open Research - It's not just about open access publishing anymore, there are multiple branches of Open Research including; Open data, Open Monographs, Open Research log books, Pre-Print servers and platforms like Figshare where you can share conference presentations which link to your papers.

There is mounting evidence that opening up the research process from start to finish improves the impact of the final outputs - Open Access publishing is also being made a requirement by an increasing amount of funders. For more details on Open Research see our page on Open Access publishing in general, and what is required by Swansea University

- Promote your work - the publishing process is grueling, but you shouldn't abandon your article as soon as it's done. Take the chance to attend and speak at conferences - you may meet future collaboration partners. Increasingly academics use social media like Twitter, blogs and networks like Research Gate or the University Strategic Communications Team to promote their work.

While not everyone is comfortable with this, we're always here to help with questions especially around copyright or intellectual property worries. Use other departments such as The Press Office - they can help you promote your work, and have a list of experts in fields ready for journalist queries - you could be that expert!

- Optimize your research for search engines - Choose good keywords whenever you are given the chance to, either within your article or in any repository you put it in. Keywords can also be used as hashtags if you're promoting your work on Twitter. Consider how others might search for your article - what words would they use - especially if they are outside of academia. Keyword Cloud Builder tool.

- Make sure you use your full university address - It is important that your work can be traced back to Swansea University. Using an address such as Singleton Hospital or a research group without a university name and address can risk your work not being credited to the university when rankings are worked out.