Researchers should be trained to manage their online profiles by listing the most valuable and widely visible works, which may attract attention of both professionals and the public-at-large. It is equally important to understand the value and relevance of the currently available evaluation metrics, which can be displayed on individual profiles by sourcing information from various bibliographic databases, search engines, and social networking platforms.
Reference: Gasparyan, A. Y., Yessirkepov, M., Duisenova, A., Trukhachev, V. I., Kostyukova, E. I., & Kitas, G. D. (2018). Researcher and author impact metrics: variety, value, and context. Journal of Korean Medical Science 33(18).
To help ensure that you can publish your work in an open access repository after publishing it in a for-profit journal, make sure to thoroughly review the publisher copyright form(s) associated with your work and, if necessary, stipulate that you want to retain rights over your work.
The majority of for-profit publishers will allow publishing authors to make this demand in the form an addendum, but the responsibility falls with you to know your rights. Look for your journal in Sherpa Romeo for a summary of publishers' open access archiving conditions and policies for individual journals. Use this SPARC Author Addendum to help you retain certain rights to your research.
According to Piwowar et al., 2018, the rate of open access research has grown rapidly over the years, and OA research receives 18% more citations than average. For researchers who lack funds or institutional credentials to access research behind paywalls, open access also promotes equitable access to scholarship, allowing researchers everywhere barrier-free access to scholarly innovations.
If you are a full-time JHU faculty member, use JHU's PASS (Public Access Submission System) to both quickly and easily submit your manuscripts to funder and institutional publication repositories and to comply with access policies.
If your publication is part of a larger research project, or if you belong to a research network, consider creating a website to communicate the aims of the study, the patient population, sources of funding, researchers involved, and any resulting publications. Study websites are especially important if you are planning to recruit participants for your project because they can help communicate and translate the research in a way that non-researcher communities can more-easily understand.
Consider creating a public-facing Zotero library to show visitors the publications resulting from your study.
Conduct outreach via social media channels such as Twitter to raise awareness about your work and reach a wider audience (see section above).
WordPress, Squarespace, and Drupal are recommended content management systems for managing online content.
If you happen to find errors in your research output, such as missing documents, incorrect names or affiliations, or duplicates of your profile or work, contact the publisher or database host. The links below are some recommended methods for fixing errors:
It is important to think beyond citation counts and your research network to measure the true global impact of your work. The alternative metrics section highlights the importance of understanding the impact of your work beyond the number of citations you've received.
See our highlighted alternative metric tools such as PlumX Metrics and Altmetric to measure your research dissemination and impact using social media platforms and other online outlets.
Citation-based academic impact metrics . . . aim to measure the popularity of journals and authors at a high level, rather than represent the merits of a single piece of research.
Reference: Ravenscroft, J., Liakata, M., Clare, A., & Duma, D. (2017). Measuring scientific impact beyond academia: An assessment of existing impact metrics and proposed improvements. PloS one(3), e0173152.