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Nine free resources to promote your research

September 11, 2020 | 5 min read

By Judy Allen, Steven Turner

Illustration of human hand with a megaphone surrounded by media icons

Highlights from our newly revised free guide on how to get noticed

More than 2.5 million scientific articles are published each year, and that number is rising. So it’s increasingly important for you to find ways to make your article stand out. In the age of social media, online networking and digital dissemination, there is a bewildering variety of opportunities for authors to promote their published research widely with colleagues, the media and the general public. So how do you navigate this complicated space and ensure success? Luckily for you, here at Elsevier, we’ve been hard at work updating our popular guide on “how to get your research published and then noticed”.

To mark the release of the new guide (which is freely available to download(opens in new tab/window)), we’ll take a moment to review some of the advice on how to share your article widely — and make an impact globally. Here are nine resources you can use to help get your research to the people who need it, ensuring maximum exposure and engagement for your work:

Increase your visibility through profiles

Scholarly collaboration networks: Sharing and collaboration is central to research, and scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) can be beneficial at every stage of your workflow, particularly when it’s time to promote your articles. SCNs are platforms that host content and facilitate article sharing and collaboration among researchers. The biggest SCNs include Mendeley, Academia.edu and ResearchGate so consider establishing a profile on one of these.

Scopus: With a Scopus profile, you can get credit for your work and explore article metrics to quantify your impact. Author profiles on Scopus are linked to all publications through ORCID. By maintaining an up-to-date author profile, you can make sure you’re showcasing your research and inviting future career opportunities. What’s more, with the free Scopus validation tool, you can check and amend your profiles.

Contribute to wider progress by sharing

Share Links: You can make a bigger impact with your new publication by sharing it. When you publish with Elsevier, in most cases you will receive a Share Link — a customized link to your article on ScienceDirect that provides 50 days’ free access. You can pass your Share Link on to colleagues, friends and family, and use it to promote your article by email and on social media. Anyone who clicks on your Share Link within the 50-day period will be taken directly to the article with no sign-up or registration required. After the free access period, the usual access rules apply.

Howcanishareit.com: The STM Association has created howcanishareit.com(opens in new tab/window) to answer your questions and explain how you can share articles published in academic journals. It includes the “Can I Share It” look-up tool which gives academic researchers an easy way to check where a journal article can be shared in line with the paper’s access and usage rights.

Lay summaries: With a lay summary, you can help people without a scientific understanding to access — and understand — your results. A lay summary is a short account of a paper written in clear, non-scientific language. It can be used to explain research findings and why they matter. At Elsevier, several journals provide the ability to publish a lay summary, helping you reach a wider audience with your research.

Harness the power of social media to increase your reach

Social media: There are billions of people on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, WeChat, Weibo… and whatever the next platform will be. These are great places to share research. There is an art and a science to using social media so brush up on your skills with the Researcher Academy module “social media for researchers(opens in new tab/window)”.

Track your impact to gain valuable insights into your articles’ performance

PlumX Metrics: Gain insights into the ways people interact with your research output online, showing you a detailed picture of your impact. Find out more about PlumX Metrics(opens in new tab/window).

Mendeley Impact: Enjoy a unique, connected view of how your published articles are performing in terms of citations, how many Mendeley users have read your articles, views of the articles you have published in an Elsevier publication, your h-index and media mentions. Visit your Mendeley profile and view your impact.

Newsflo: Measure your societal impact by uncovering relevant mentions of your research across tens of thousands of mass media outlets around the world. Newsflo gives you a way to measure the wider impact of your work by tracking and analyzing its media coverage.

We hope the above advice has been useful and wish you every success with your next article. Make sure to download your own copy of the guide to get full advantage of advice on the publication workflow and how you can get the most out of your publications.

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