Tips for Widening Your Impact
Visibility = impact! Increasing the visibility and readership of your work is the easiest way to ensure it has as great an impact as possible.
- Publish Open Access. When your article is not locked behind a paywall more readers will have access to your work, including health care practitioners that may not be affiliated with university libraries. There have been many studies exploring the citation advantage of OA articles. One systematic review suggests citation counts are increased by around 18% (Piowar, et al., 2018).
- Ensure you are utilizing available research IDs and profiles. The more links to your works the better! We highly recommend Google Scholar, ORCID, and your Scopus profile for starters. Additionally, article IDs such as DOIs and PMIDs ensure that the full text of your work can be directly linked to on blogs, social media, news articles, and more.
- Disseminate full text copies of your article wherever possible. Check your publishing agreement with the journal, you should have rights to post the pre-print (prior to any peer review or journal formatting) to pre-print servers like arXiv.
- Send out announcements on appropriate listservs for your professional organizations or interest groups.