Ways to Increase Your Academic Visibility

by Adrian Andreescu , Associate Circulation Editor IJTS

The Enigma
The aim of scholarly research is to make a contribution to the existing human knowledge. Still, many
scholars are aware of valuable articles that are rarely cited in the academic literature. The innovative
advances delayed by the cumulative research impact lost cannot be accurately calculated at this moment.
Probably eighty years from now, future studies will present detailed insights into the causes and
consequences of early 21th century’s increased scholarship fragmentation.

One Motive (Among Others)

A large number of your peers (most of them outside your specific area of research) have a million and
one reasons to do something other than spend long hours searching for articles from different fields and
trying to find out which of them might offer (against the odds) some novel perspective or unexpected
justification for their own research.

A Five-Step Solution to Increase Your Academic Visibility

1. Craft your articles for a larger audience.

There is no secret that papers grounded in and speaking to multiple fields often have the broadest impact
and appeal. If most of your articles do not fall in this category, spend some time trying to identify a
different academic audience that currently debates issues to which you could provide an unexpected
perspective (concentrate on publishing in international journals across disciplines). Remember that “We
are not students of some subject matter but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the
borders of any subject or discipline”. (Karl Popper)

As dissemination of scientific publications via the web is becoming more common nowadays,
serendipity is intricately woven within the fabric of a casual Google search. Make sure you write
“search-engine friendly” papers (read here and here some useful tips).

Present your finding in ways that are credible and persuasive to the readers. Without engaging your
expected audience into the text, a flawless logic of complex arguments might have in some cases
alienating effects as many potential readers do not attempt to decipher those academic articles looking

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like an impenetrable thicket of words. In case you have been socialized into the norms of writing
through a process of implicit learning, you might appreciate some articulated suggestions on academic
discourse from peers like Sternberg (here), Boellstorff (here and here), Ellis (here), Bem (here and
here ), Caulley (here), Weick (here), Frank (here), Fernández-Ríos & Buela-Casal (here) or Knox
(here).

2. Submit your articles to suitable journals.

Don’t aim only at those journals that are rejecting over 80% of the manuscripts submitted for
consideration as this narrow approach might imply in the end a lot of frustration for you, a delay in
publication and an inefficient use of reviewers’ time and energy.

3. Self-archive your papers.

Why it is very important to self archive your academic articles in a repository? Because the goal of your
dissemination activity should be to maximise research usage and impact. Try to avoid uploading your
papers exclusively in institutional repositories that are not open to public access. Better solutions are
currently available (e.g., Social Science Research Network, The Social Science Open Access
Repository, HAL, CogPrints, Hprints, OpenDepot, ResearchGate). Self-archiving is easy ! As many
articles can be self-archived in compliance with publisher policy, put them on the paths that most
scholars use when they explore the information jungle. Open repositories are especially useful when
your are not publishing in journals that have sufficient mass to make your work rapidly visible to a
wider international audience.

A brief synthesis relevant to the OA/non-OA debate, can be found in an article published not long ago in
Journal of Clinical Psychology:
“Harnad and Brody (2004) compared the citation counts of individual OA and non-OA physics articles
appearing in the same (non-OA) journals (The OA articles in non-OA journals were made OA by their
authors through self-archived eprints).They found citation advantages for OA articles of 200 to 300%,
depending on the publication year. Similar studies have compared OA and non-OA articles in
astronomy, computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, philosophy, and political science,
finding OA impact advantage rates of 25 to 250% (Antelman, 2004; Eysenbach, 2006; Hajjem, Harnad,
& Gingras, 2005b; Kurtz et al., 2005a; Lawrence, 2001), with an average OA advantage of 93.2% in
psychology (Hajjem et al., 2005a).[…] Scholars wishing to maximize the diffusion of their research

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among the professional community should deposit eprints of their work in OA archives. There are no
copyright or other legal barriers to this OA strategy, with 91% of research journals (including all APA
and Wiley journals) already giving their explicit green light to authors self-archiving of pre- or
postprints (Eprints, 2008). One hundred percent OA is a reachable goal.”

4. Be committed to disseminate the findings of your work.

A “CERN for social scientists” is unlikely to be created in the next decades. In this context, you should
become more involved in the dissemination of your papers. As stated by Shelley E. Taylor in her article,
“marketing papers, a concept alien to some scientists, is increasingly important if we are to reach the
multiple fields to which our work may contribute. […] We can send our papers out to a target audience
that might otherwise not read the journal. Authors might be well advised to create a list of people in
other fields unlikely to otherwise encounter the paper and e-mail it to them.”

5. Network curiously and habitually with other scholars.

You might consider creating an account on a site like Academia.edu. Your profile should not be limited
to your name and the email address. Upload a photo, your papers, select at least some relevant research
interests, “follow” the profiles of your peers, etc. Give others a chance to find out more about your
work! Uncuriosity can be dangerously comfortable especially within the sophisticated, intellectual world
of Academe. In the effort to raise your long-term visibility and impact, you must become aware of novel
research opportunities. Also, remain curious about big, intractable problems and invest at least one
hour/week for online interaction with scholars from outside your niche research area. Keep in mind that
theoretical innovation and new findings come often through cross-fertilization and interdisciplinary
research.

Note: You can help scholarly research circulate and interact more freely by forwarding the above
educational hypertext to your peers or by posting it on any academic blog or listserv, under the Creative
Commons - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 . The author does not assume and hereby
disclaims any liability to any party for any loss or damage resulting from the unappropriate use of
information mentioned in Ways to Increase Your Academic Visibility (the webpages and their contents
are provided on an "as is" basis, without warranty of any kind, either express or implied from the
author). Sept. 2010