To Be Cited – Promote your Publications To Researchers

Kickstarting Citations of Your New Publication
Every scholar is aware of the importance of citations to career success, but some may not realise how vital it is for a new scientific or academic publication to begin earning citations very quickly indeed after it has been published. In order to be cited almost immediately, your work will need to be seen and read, and the competition for today’s readers is nothing less than fierce even for specialised material with a well-established audience. It is therefore essential to be proactive in promoting your publications if they are to help you achieve the scholarly success you desire.

The first and most obvious thing to do as soon as your new article or book is published is to let your colleagues and mentors know about it. You may have recruited some of these individuals to help you polish your writing as you prepared it for publication, but it never hurts to remind them that the piece is now officially available, and those who do not already know about your new publication should. You may want to inform only the scholars who work in your discipline and field, but spreading the word to those who work in other areas but may nonetheless be interested in your writing can be productive as well, particularly with the current popularity of interdisciplinary studies. Family and friends may also want to read your work, and although they might not be the ones who give you those scholarly citations you crave, it is impossible to predict who will pass the information about your work on to someone who will want to cite your book or article, so the more the merrier.

Social media can serve as excellent platforms for informing people about your publications. Certainly scholarly and professional sites such as Academia.edu and LinkedIn should be put to good use. When you add your new publication to such sites, it will be visible not only to anyone who views your profile, but also through updates and feeds to those who are connected with or following you and in some cases to those simply interested in similar topics and research areas. Depending on the platform, you may be able to bolster this exposure by writing and posting a brief introduction to your new work. Do be careful, however, not to upload all or part of your publication unless this is acceptable in relation to the contract you have signed with the publisher.

Social sites that are considered more personal than professional also serve as good venues for promoting your writing. Facebook, for instance, is used with great success by many authors, and while it may not earn you as many citations as a scholarly site could, visibility is never a bad thing. Even an announcement by your proud grandmother on the cooking site she frequents just might earn you a serious reader who ultimately cites your work – even scholars have to eat, after all.

Blogging about your new publication is another excellent strategy. If you have your own blog, you should definitely post something on it about your new article or book, but unless you already have a fairly large following of engaged readers, you may also want to blog elsewhere. Multi-author sites that focus on work in your discipline or subject area and have established a large readership are perfect platforms for announcing and summarising your work in tantalising ways that will interest readers and inspire them to move on to your entire publication via the link you provide at the end of your post.

Organising your paper into effective paragraphs will only be successful, however, if the transitions between your paragraphs are smooth and clear. If you are shifting to a different topic or focussing on a different study as you begin a new paragraph, you need to make that absolutely clear by explaining the transition. Use specific discourse markers indicating a change of topic, a comparison or contrast, or a focus on a different study or text or experiment, and repeat whatever words are necessary at the beginning of a new paragraph to connect it logically to the paragraph before it. Pronouns such as ‘it,’ ‘this’ and ‘they’ should be avoided at the beginning of a new paragraph: even if the antecedent is obvious, starting a paragraph with a pronoun is simply poor style in English, and when the antecedent is not obvious, it’s extremely difficult for your reader to determine exactly what you’re talking about. Use a noun or noun phrase instead to identify your subject at the beginning of a new paragraph and you’ll find that not only your paragraphs, but the logical movement of your paper as a whole will benefit (on the use of pronouns, see also Section 4.4.3).