30-Day Impact Challenge: the Ultimate Guide to Raising the Profile of Your Research by Stacy Konkiel
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The 30-Day Impact Challenge: the ultimate guide to raising the profile of your research By Stacy Konkiel The text and image contents of this eBook are copyright Impactstory.org and licensed for reuse, remixing, and redistribution under a CC-BY 4.0 license (unless otherwise noted). Table of Contents Introduction Day 1: Make a profile on Academia.edu Day 2: Make a ResearchGate profile Day 3: Create a Google Scholar Profile Day 4: Connect with other researchers on Mendeley Day 5: Make LinkedIn work for your research Day 6: Create an academic website Day 7: Establish your expertise with a science blog Day 8: Promote your research with Kudos Day 9: Find your community on Twitter Day 10: Explore using Facebook in a professional context Day 11: Social media automation for academics Day 12: Make your data discoverable on a data repository Day 13: Share your research software on GitHub Day 14: Slideshare for conference talks Day 15: Publish Open Access for more citations Day 16: Post your preprints Day 17: Claim your ORCID identifier Day 18: Make a video abstract for your research Day 19: Establish your expertise with Open Peer Review Day 20: Stay up-to-date on your colleague’s work Day 21: Stay up-to-date on your entire field Day 22: Get your research to the press Day 23: Make connections and promote your work on listservs Day 24: Hustle at conferences Day 25: Mentor other scientists Day 26: Expand your co-authorship base Day 27: Track your scholarly social media and website impacts Day 29: Discover when your work is discussed & shared online Day 30: Create a comprehensive impact profile at Impactstory Introduction In a hugely competitive research landscape, scientists can no longer afford to just publish and hope for the best. To leave a mark, researchers have to take their impact into their own hands. But where do you start? There are so many ways to share, promote, and discuss your research, especially online. It’s tough to know where to begin. Luckily, we’ve got your back. Drawing on years of experience measuring and studying research impact, we’ve created a list of the top 30 can’t-miss, proven effective steps for you to make sure your hard work gets out there, gets attention, and makes a difference—both in your field and with the public. Over the next 30 days, we’re going to work together to supercharge your research impact. You’ll: • Upgrade your professional visibility by conquering social media, • Boost your readership and citations by getting your work online, • Stay atop your field’s latest developments with automated alerting, • Lock in the key connections with colleagues that’ll boost your career, and • Dazzle evaluators with comprehensive tracking and reporting on your own impacts. Each chapter’s challenge will look like this: we’ll describe an important strategy for scholarly and public impact--why it’s important, how you can get started, and some resources to help you excel--and then share a homework assignment, where you’ll apply the concepts we’ve covered. In the chapters that follow, we share a tip per day (though you’re welcome to try out multiple steps in a single day, or do these challenges at your leisure). We challenge you to follow along and give each one a try. If you’re up to the challenge, we guarantee that by the end of the month, your research will get a boost in exposure and you’ll also have made important connections with other scientists around the world. Let’s get started. Day 1: Make a profile on Academia.edu You know all those things you wish your CV was smart enough to do--embed your papers, automatically give you readership statistics, and so on? Academia.edu and ResearchGate (which we’ll cover in the next chapter) are two academic social networks that allow you to do these things, and then some. Perhaps more importantly, they’re places where your colleagues are spending a lot of their time. Actively participating on one or both networks will give you ample opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. And getting your publications and presentations onto these sites will make it easier for others to encounter your work. They do this not only through the social network they help you build, but also by improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your research, making you much more “googleable”. Both platforms allow you to do the following: • Create a profile that summarizes your research • Upload your publications, so others can find them • Find and follow other researchers, so you can receive automatic updates on their new publications • Find and read others’ publications • See platform-specific metrics that indicate the readership and reach you have on those sites In today’s challenge, let’s dig into the basics of setting up a profile and uploading your work on Academia.edu. Getting started Logon to Academia.edu. If you’re a firm believer in keeping your professional online presence separate from your personal one, you’ll likely want to sign up using your university email address. Otherwise, you can sign up using your Facebook or Google profile. From here, you’ll be directed through the basic signup process. First up: posting a publication or two. How do you choose what to share? If you’re an established researcher, this will be easy: just choose your most “famous” (read: highly cited) paper. If you’re a junior researcher or a student, choosing might be tougher. A peer-reviewed paper is always a good bet, as-is a preprint or a presentation that’s closely related to your most current topic of research. Got a paper in mind? Now comes the not-as-fun-but-incredibly-necessary part: making sure you’ve got the rights to post it. Most academics don’t realize that they generally sign away their copyright when publishing an article with a traditional publisher. And that means you may not have the rights to post the publisher’s version of your article on Academia.edu. (If you negotiated to keep your copyright or published with an authors’ rights-respecting journal like PLOS Biology, give yourself a pat on the back and skip the following paragraph.) If you don’t have copyright for your paper, all hope is not lost! You likely have the right to post your version of the article (often the unedited, unformatted version). Head over to Sherpa/Romeo and look up the journal you published in. You’ll see any and all restrictions that the publisher has placed on how you can share your article. If you can post your article, upload it to Academia.edu. Click the green “Upload a paper” button and, on your computer, find the publication you want to upload. Click “Open” and watch as Academia.edu begins to upload your paper. Once it’s uploaded, the title of your publication will be automatically extracted. Make any corrections necessary to the title, and then click in the “Find a Research Interest” box below the title. Add some keywords that will help others find your publication. Click save. Now it’s time to add your affiliation and interests to your profile. Adding an affiliation is important because it will add you to a subdomain of Academia.edu built for your university, and that will allow you to more easily find your colleagues. The site will try to guess your affiliation based on your email address or IP address; make any corrections needed and add your department information and title. Click “Save & Continue.” Then, add your research interests on the following page. These are also important; they’ll help others find you and your work. Now let’s connect with your colleagues who are already on Academia.edu. You can either connect your Facebook account or an email account to Academia.edu, which will search your contacts and suggest connections. Congrats, you’ve now got an Academia.edu profile! You can continue to spruce it up by adding more publications, as well as adding a photo of yourself and other research interests and publications, and connecting your Academia profile to other services like Twitter and LinkedIn, if you’re already on ‘em. (If not, don’t worry--we’ll cover that soon.) Homework Now that you have a profile, set aside half an hour to explore three important uses of Academia.edu: • Exploring “research interests” in order to discover other researchers and publications; • Getting more of your most important publications online; and • Using the Analytics feature to discover who’s following you, how often others are reading and downloading your work, and in which countries your work is most popular. Research interests: click on the research interests in your. For the search results that appear, take some time to explore the profiles of others who share your interest(s) and follow anyone that looks interesting. Click on the Documents tab of the search results and explore relevant papers and presentations; I’m willing to bet you’ll find many that you weren’t aware of before. You can also use the Academia.edu search to look for research interests outside of the ones you’ve got listed in your profile, and explore those search results, too. Upload more papers & presentations: click the “Upload papers” tab at the top right corner of your screen and upload at least two more papers or presentations that you think are worthy of attention. Remember to abide by any copyright restrictions that might exist, and also be sure to add as much descriptive information as possible, adding the complete title, co-authors, and research interests for your paper, all of which will make it easier for others to find.