Academic Publishing and Impact: Promoting Research

 It is not uncommon for databases to make mistakes and attribute articles to the wrong person or institution. It is worth taking the time to search Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar to make sure that your papers are attributed to you. 

- Use a unique identifier such as an ORCID ID to make sure you can be distinguished from other researchers with a similar name, and that your work is attributed to the right person.

- Make sure that you are consistent in the form of your name that you use in the publications and the university name in full. 

- You can link your ORCID to Swansea systems by following the steps in the PDF below. 

 Keeping an up to date list of your publications will help with this. If you use RIS/Cronfa as your publication list, your staff page will automatically be up to date. 

It's a good idea to know how your work is being measured, cited or the impact and attention it is receiving

There are tools to keep you informed when someone cites your work, and plenty of metrics measuring citation data, but those aren't the only sources of information. We can also retrieve data about book holdings if your discipline is more monograph focused than journal article focused. 

For a full list of services we offer see our page on 'Measuring Impact'

- 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. There are some tips on collaborating with multiple authors in this pre-print article

- 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, 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 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 department 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. 

- 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.