The Paper Promoters

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ILLUSTRATION BY THE PROJECT TWINS F gist —someone investigates who effects the in her spare time she is a biogeomorpholo at State California Parks inSacramento, but BY JEFFREYPERKEL sand dunes on coast. California “I’m the pretty studies how plants shape development the of of organisms on landscapes. In her case, she it. Tobias is an environmental scientist research — and field even fewer study people haveew heard of Michele Tobias’s A tool called Kudos aimsto help researchers maximize © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited, partof Springer Nature. All rights reserved. PROMOTERS the reach and impact oftheir work. - THE PAPER and expect itand to go expect somewhere,” she says. anfind audience. Ican’t just publish something publication,scientific to Ineed spread out and someone who’s fairly young of field inthe as many eyesto her papers as possible. “Being pushing her message to media draw on social care about her work. She has become adept at about California’s management coastal should studyinghas been phenomenon,” this she says. much, as far as Iknow, only the who person But Tobias make who decisions those thinks TOOLBOX

4 AUGUSTVOL4 2016| NATURE 536| |113 free site called Kudos, sitefree called aims which to help of an online tool for managing practice: a the sion. That demand has to emergence led the are comingspectrum to same the conclu Increasingly, researchers across scientific the mends scientists toot own their horns as well. lina State University But he recom inRaleigh. research communications at lead North Caro versities have press says offices, Matt Shipman, in publicexperts relations — that’s why uni

It’s not of job the researchers to become

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researchers maximize the reach and impact integrating them into one site is unique, he says. Matthew Bowler, a scientist at the European of their papers on social media, and measure In particular, Kudos makes it easier for mid-to- Molecular Biology Laboratory in Grenoble, the effects of their efforts. late-career academics, who often are wary of France, and a Kudos user. The plain language Tobias is a fan, and so are many others. Since social media, to engage on those platforms and makes it easier for them to understand a study’s its launch in May 2014, the website’s user base measure the impact of that activity. “Creating context and significance, and to find research has grown to more than 100,000 users with a mechanism that makes it easier to onboard papers through general keyword searches. around 4,000 sign-ups each month, says them into that world, is novel,” he says. That said, it takes time and dedication to co-founder Charlie Rapple, who — like most of The site is free for academics because schol- make such resources pay off, Shipman says. Kudos’s staff — is based in Oxford, UK. arly institutions, societies, publishers and other It isn’t easy to translate research findings into commercial clients pay for its upkeep. Kudos something accessible to other disciplines, let REACHING A WIDER AUDIENCE helps these customers to track and evaluate alone to the general public. “Having access to “With so much more research being under- their researchers (or, in the case of publishers, a platform like Kudos is great in that it gives a taken and published, the current system of their authors) and foster a stronger relation- place for your research story to live. But dissemination can no longer guarantee that ship with them, explains Rapple. By encour- it does not make you a better story teller, and it your work will find its audience,” says Rapple. aging researchers to do outreach, the site also does not help you reach and find an audience Kudos, she says, aims “to make research more indirectly builds the profile of their institution for that story,” he says. A poorly worded plain- discoverable” and to “help researchers get more or their journal, she adds. And Rapple hopes language summary would be little better than credit for what they do and achieve more with that publishers and institutions can build up the article abstract. their work”. Kudos gives each research paper valuable intelligence from the Kudos database Some research journals already provide its own profile page, which users can flesh about the effects of different kinds of outreach. plain-language summaries for non-specialist out with a plain-language summary, external The site has established partnerships with some readers, but these are often written by editors, resources, reviews, presentations and more. 65 publishers so far, including well-known not the authors themselves. Nature is one, Tobias says that more than 830 individuals firms such as Wiley and Taylor & Francis. and in June it started a trial of author-written have viewed a summary of one of her papers summaries (although they are still edited by on the site. She also linked one of her studies PAPERS IN PLAIN LANGUAGE journal staff before publication). Over June to a YouTube video in which members of her Kudos’s support for displaying plain-language and July, the journal released 500-word sum- contemporary dance company represented the summaries, which researchers can write to maries of 12 previously published articles, says role of plants in sand dune formation through make their articles accessible to a wider audi- Nature editorial director Ritu Dhand. Mean- improvisational dance. “It’s kind of an interest- ence, is particularly useful, Tananbaum says. while, eLife, which hires writers to produce ing experiment, but it’s related to the paper so I The family members of someone with cancer, plain-language summaries, as well as writing linked it in the resources section.” for example, may be better able to understand some in-house, posts around 10% of its ‘digests’ Another Kudos user, Antony Williams of the the context and significance of a medical study on the popular blogging platform Medium to National Center for Computational Toxicol- from a simple description than from the pub- broaden the journal’s audience, says Stuart ogy in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, lished abstract, he says. Tobias, similarly, says King, associate features editor at eLife. likes that the site provides a forum for linking she hopes that the summary she has written for to post-publication commentary and related one of her papers will bring it to the attention PERSONAL DECISION articles — which he calls “forward citation”. of policymakers and resource managers. Each researcher must make a personal choice Users also create their own overall profile page, But even researchers within one’s immediate about how much time to spend promoting which can automatically pull in data from field can benefit from such summaries, says their work on social media. But judicious research-profiling services such as ORCID. use of self-promotion, says Shipman, leads to This material isn’t only visible on Kudos’s visibility, which in turn can lead to increased site: it can also appear in a small box next to a citations and attract talented graduate students paper on external sites thanks to ‘widgets’ that MORE ONLINE and postdocs to the lab. Yet scientists cannot Kudos provides to third parties such as research CAREERS simply flit in and out of the social-media land- publishers. The International Union of Crystal- Social media: scape and hope to make a significant impact, lography, for instance, displays Kudos profiles A network Shipman adds. “Like any other relationship, it next to papers in the structural-biology journal boost takes time and effort to build and sustain an Acta Crystallographica Section D. go.nature. online network.” To help researchers promote their work com/2aaIr5m For researchers who might feel daunted by to others, Kudos also provides its users with the breadth of the social-media landscape, Wil- trackable URLs, which they can send out by liams, who has given seminars in the United e-mail, Twitter, Facebook or other social-media States and internationally on social media for platforms. Kudos tallies the resulting clicks — CHRISTOPHE HEYLEN/GETTY scientists, offers simple advice: choose two or allowing researchers, as well as institutional three social-media platforms, invest the time press offices and funding agencies, to look at ARTICLE COLLECTIONS to get them set up, and then spend perhaps two which outlets produce the best return on invest- hours a month keeping them current. If noth- ment, says Rapple. The site also aggregates data ● Online collaboration: Scientists and the ing else, he says, build a LinkedIn profile as an from Altmetric.com, which finds mentions of social network go.nature.com/2ayp23c online CV, claim and update an ORCID ID, papers on mainstream and social media, as well ● Science and sexism: In the eye of the and log peer-review activities on Publons.com. as citation figures from Thomson Reuters and Twitterstorm go.nature.com/2ah8y22 That said, a research paper is itself the end article-download counts from publishers. ● The scientists who get credit for peer product of an extraordinary investment of Some of the services Kudos provides are review go.nature.com/2acyAlC time and energy. It takes thousands of hours available elsewhere, notes Greg Tananbaum, of research, data analysis, writing and peer who owns the California-based ScholarNext For more on scientific software, apps and review, he says. “Shouldn’t you put at least 10 consultancy and focuses on scholarly commu- online tools, visit nature.com/toolbox to 20 hours of work into making sure that you nication and academic technology issues. But can get the message out to relevant people?” ■

CLARIFICATION This article should have made clear that Altmetric.com collects data from both mainstream and social media.