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Measuring Research Impact: Improve Visibility


Libguide for Faculty



Increase the visibility of Research

Activities aimed at promoting research are increasingly crucial in researchers’ work. Making the research visible and accessible increases the chances of the research being noticed, used, and impacted, thus increasing the reputation and chances of success in academic work.

Researchers can embrace various activities and tools to promote work, connect with other researchers, and engage in scholarly discourse. 

Get a unique author identifies to distinguish your work among the community

ORCID ID: ORCID iD, with nearly 2 million users, is quickly becoming the identifier of choice for researchers, publishers, funding organizations, and research institutions. This identifier is used in manuscript and data submission processes and embedded into metadata to permanently link an author with their research outputs. Funders also use it to streamline grant application processes and by research organizations to track and report on the research activities of their researchers.

Researcher ID: ResearchID presents a solution to researchers to create and update the profile with minimum effort. ResearchID consolidates multiple research profiles and offers a one-stop free individual webpage listing that includes all publications and achievements from various sources. ResearchID allows researchers to claim and showcase publications to collaborators while minimizing the manual updates.

Share output of the Research

Publications, preprints, conference papers and posters, presentations, research data, video, code are all evidence of your research activity. Making them all publicly accessible will increase visibility, preserve your outputs, and make them available for future use.

Institutional and subject repositories are great places to make your research outputs available openly.  OpenDOAR is a comprehensive database of open access repositories. 

Popular publication subject repositories include:

  • AgEcon (Agriculture and Applied Economics) maintained by the University of Minnesota's Department of Applied Economics 
  • ArXiv - (pre-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, and Statistics)  Currently maintained by Cornell University Library
  • CiteSeer - (Computer and Information Science)  maintained by College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University
  • PhilPapers - (Philosophy) maintained by the Center for Digital Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario
  • PubMedCentral - is a repository for US federally funded research outputs in Medicine.  It is required for all publications supported by NIH (and some other US federal agencies) funding to be deposited in PubMedCentral.  This site explains the mandate and the process.
  • Research Papers in Economics (Repec) is a collaborative effort of volunteers in 86 countries to disseminate research in economics and related sciences. It is a bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, chapters, and software components.
  • Social Science Research Network (SSRN) aims to disseminate early social science, business, law, and economics research.  It allows for the deposit of both abstracts of working papers and upcoming publications and full text of published outputs. 

Create and keep up to date online profile

These could be your personal and institutional web pages or commercial services, allowing you to highlight your professional accomplishments and areas of expertise.

  • Google Scholar Citation Profile: It is a popular tool to showcase your research outputs alongside citations  associated with these outputs. It also calculates some basic bibliometric impact indicators such as h-index and i10-index.
  • Impact Story: is a free online tool that allows you to showcase your research outputs (publications, presentations, data, code, posters, etc.) together with measures of their impact.  Impact story uses ORCID profiles to find and import scholarly works. 
  • KUDOS: is a new service that helps researchers promote their research outputs. It is currently free to use and allows you to showcase your publications by creating links to full text and including additional information like short title, lay language explanation, impact statement.

Engage in Social Networking Communities

Another great way to disseminate your research and gain a reputation is through active engagement in research networking communities.

  1. Research Gate
  2. Academia.edu
  3. LinkedIn
  4. Mendeley

Blog

Blogging is also an excellent tool for making your research content more visible.  When you write a blog post, you create content that can be freely shared via social media.  Blogs content is freely available and not limited by publisher restrictions, thus potentially reaching and influencing much wider and diverse audiences.

Tweet

Twitter is an increasingly popular tool for researchers to popularize their research and build a reputation.


SPARC: SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.
COPE: COPE(Committee on Publication Ethics) is committed to educating and supporting editors, publishers and those involved in publication ethics with the aim of moving the culture of publishing towards one where ethical practice become a normal part of the publishing culture.
LIBER: Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche is an Association of European Research Libraries to promote world-class research. The network of liber is covering organizations in Europe and beyond and is based on goal-oriented partnerships. LIBER's 2018-2022 policy endorses the exceptional focus on the key topics of Copyright Reform, Digital Humanities, Open Access, Metrics, Research Data Management, etc.