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Documenting Impact & Increasing Visibility

Examples and tutorials for documenting and improving scholarly visibility and impact.

Recommended Readings

Be Findable

binocularsThere are a lot of ways to increase your online visibility but it all comes down to increasing your findability.
When you sign up or create an online profile make information as public as possible. This helps distinguish you from others with the same, or similar, names.

Google Scholar

Creating a public Google Scholar profile is an easy way to increase your findability and it also provides other benefits such as an author H-index, citation counts, and more.

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More Ideas & Recommendations for Increasing Visibility

Basic best practices for increasing online visibility

  • Create academic profiles, especially on open platforms, to improve search results and provide access to your work.
  • Publish Open Access
  • Share publications on social media sites
    • You can gain readers by providing easy links to your papers; Open access versions will work best that way everyone can read it.
    • Twitter is an especially good tool for this as all public tweets can be searched.

Methods for increasing visibility (and their acceptability) vary in each discipline.The following are merely suggestions/ideas to get you thinking:

  • Publish Open Access or self-archive in a repository whenever possible.
  • Publish and share research data, software, teaching materials, etc. 
  • Include links to your academic profile(s) in your email signature.
  • Provide links to copies of your publications (such as DR@ISU) instead of just hosting them on a personal webpage.
    • Avoid posting your work anywhere that requires an account to login.
  • Bone up on how Google Search works.
    • Facebook shares, back links, and tweets are the top ways to increase page visibility in search engine result pages.
  • Maximize your publication keywords
    • Keywords and abstracts play a vital role in searching - especially for indexes or search engines that do not have the full-text of the article available. Make sure your keywords are appropriate and descriptive.
  • Publish thought-provoking, critical pieces, or a literature review
    • These kinds of publications traditionally have higher citation rates as do publications dealing with hot topics.

For additional information specific to a given discipline, we recommend consulting senior faculty in your department.

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Lorrie Pellack
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