researcher development programmeRaising the Visibility of Your ResearchDr Bill Worthington, Research and Scholarly Communications ManagerLibrary and Computing Services, w.j.worthington@herts.ac.uk

November 2016

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchContext and Scholarly Communications

• Progression, recognition and reward in research are still dominated by the age-old process of peer reviewed publication in Journals and Conference Proceedings.

• The concepts of value to society and advancement of knowledge for the public good have been brought into focus recently by both Government and private funding bodies.

• The measurement of research outputs and the evidencing of impact has become part of the research process – in which the university and every researcher has a part to play.

• Old and new contexts in pursuit of research excellence (and the gaining of a competitive edge) have distilled into a new discipline called Scholarly Communications.

• Raising the visibility of your research is a Scholarly Communications activity.

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchScholarly Communications starts now

• Your first publication may seem a long way off, but research is a long game, and you can begin to act now to pay off in the future

• Do some things –

– establish a public personal professional research environment

– begin informally publishing

– embrace Open Scholarship

– keep an eye on the publishing landscape as it evolves

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – use new media

• New media gives an early career researcher a way of engaging with their discipline prior to publication

• Blogging, tweeting and sharing allow you to begin to build a reputation and a presence among people within your discipline and among your peers – a community of practice which will likely persist and may lead to collaboration and opportunity

• New media is immediate and ahead of the citation curve

• There is evidence for a correlation between social media ‘mentions’ and higher citation rates – you can influence the success of the papers coming out of the work in your domain

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – be consistent, professional and on message

• Separate your online professional life and personal life

• Get a sensible email address for professional use

• Always identify yourself with the same full name, use an ORCID

• It is okay to be informal, speak in the first person, and be opinionated – but respect the medium

• remember the internet is a permanent collective memory – you probably cannot retract anything with the benefit of hindsight

• more at http://www.studynet.herts.ac.uk/ptl/common/LIS.nsf/lis/Professionalprofilecoursecontent

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – example – UH part-authored paper goes almost viral

http://hdl.handle.net/2299/17249https://www.altmetric.com/details/10799842

All ‘mentions’ are attributable – you can use the research outputs higher in your food chain for discussions, and leave footprints of merit

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – use sharing and networking platforms

• Discover the people working in your field, share your reading lists, share your learning experience. For examples:

– Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu

– ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net

– Mendeley https://www.mendeley.com

– Orcid https://orcid.org

– LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – network and disseminate via Twitter

• tweet your questions, observations, little victories, and references

• Twitter is part of the narrative of your developing work: use it positively

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – get blogging

• Benefits of blogging

– Practice the art of public communication

– Bring order to a set of thought processes

– Display your reading (via linking)

– Get feedback on ideas

– Receive ‘mentions’ and build a reputation before you are formally published http://research-data-toolkit.herts.ac.uk/2012/10/dois-for-datasets/

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – get an ORCID, and use it everywhere

• Open Researcher and Contributor ID - ORCID is persistent identifier for a person:ORCID’s vision is a world where all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, borders, and time.

• The DOI (digital object identifier) has become ubiquitous as a persistent identifier and efficient access mechanism for research outputs - ORCID will do the same for researchers.

• You can register your ORCID in 30 seconds at http://orcid.org then add content as you progress

• Use your ORCID whenever you can, on all outputs – soon there will be tools that can automatically aggregate and propagate your work, for example ORCID itself, Google Scholar, ResearchFish, university research information systems.

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – aim to be open, design for open data

• Understand OpenAccess - http://www.studynet.herts.ac.uk/ptl/common/LIS.nsf/lis/OpenAccess

• There is evidence that Open Access articles have higher citation rates than non-open access articles – if you are a contributing author to your supervisor’s paper, advocate placement in an open publication, ask them about REF compliance

• Not only papers – Concordat on Open Research Data …aims to help to ensure that the research data gathered and generated by members of the UK research community is made openly available for use by others wherever possible in a manner consistent with relevant legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks and norms http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/opendata/

• Your thesis will be open - design your research to allow the data supporting it to be open too

• UHRA can publish your datasets. Datasets can attract citations in their own right.

Raising the Visibility of Your ResearchTop tips – (try to) understand the publishing environment

• Prime currency of scholarly communications is still the citation. But are all citations equal?

• Bibliometrics – a quantitative analysis of academic literature – complex and lacking in the ‘one true measure’ – care must be taken if used to decide where to publish

– Journal Impact Factor, a journal level metric often used to imply value of a citation of an a article appearing in it vs.

– h-index, a personal metric based the number of publications and number of citations

• As you plan your first publications, consider where your peer group are publishing, don’t necessarily ignore up and coming journals with low impact factors

– But do take care of predatory journals – supposedly open access journals that publish for a fee without appropriate editorial selectivity and peer review. See Beall’s List https://scholarlyoa.com/

– Ask the questions found in Publishing safe and smart with Think > Check > Submit https://edartsresearchsupport.wordpress.com/2016/10/21/publishing-safe-and-smart-with-think-check-submit/

• Altmetrics - the measurement of ‘mentions’ may become more significant

Raising the Visibility of Your Research

- is important,

- may seem like a lot to think about now, but

- is a good professional development activity, and

- can be rewarding on a long journey

Good luck!

Questions?