Putting the final touches to your publication can be one of the most important moments in life, whether you are putting the finishing touches to your degree project or have just had a peer-reviewed academic journal accepted for publication. The next question you might ask yourself is "who is going to read this?".
Discovered something new? Why not tell the world!
It's a good question. Presumably, the people who will read your work (and consider citing it if it is an academic publication) are those who are interested in it and know it exists. As the mad scientist in Dr Strangelove asked the Soviet Ambassador about the secret doomsday device about to end the world because no one knew about it and so it had no effect as a deterrent: "Why did you keep it a secret? Why didn't you tell the world?!".
People only care about what they know about
People respond to and care about things they (think they) know about and consider important. Making research visible helps ensure it continues to be funded.
A catchy title and clear subtitle spelling out what the work is about go a long way, a well structured abstract and clear indexing is also helpful, but how do you promote your research findings to the masses who will never want to read the full work?
This is such a burning question for new academics that it is even being included in the mark scheme for some undergraduates as they consider how they could promote their research project findings and increase the impact of their research on the world.
How you could promote your research project
Here's just a few ways you can promote research:
- On blogs - not just your own: offer to write a guest post for someone with an established, specialist blog.
- On social media - back in the day, Twitter was the darling of many an academic getting word out about their research and righting misconceptions about matters connected to their research interests, particularly for historians and social scientists. BlueSky and LinkedIn have largely taken over now but it really depends on where your target audience already are. If you want to reach younger people, Instagram might be great for the arts or something else that is inherently visual.
- On a professional webpage, perhaps as part of a research outputs list and (publishing licences permitting if you have submitted the article to a book publisher, magazine or journal) in an open access institutional repository, such as the University's Research Portal.
- At conferences - much research gets discussed at conferences that never makes it into a peer reviewed journal and much other research is showcased and disseminated at conferences long before it is formally peer reviewed and published. In fast moving fields like computer science, conference proceedings are often more valuable for following trends than the academic literature, which lags behind. Look for links to professional bodies on your Library Subject page - many professional bodies have annual conferences.
- Publish in a journal. Or a magazine - DLib magazine was for some time the go-to source of digital preservation research, and magazines are still the cutting edge publications of the fashion industry: not every subject aspires to journal publications, but many do, and for scientific, health, and medical research it remains the gold standard. You can visit our "journal holdings" (above the Discovery search bar on the Library Search Page and search for the titles of journals that sound relevant to your topic, visit that journal's homepage and look at the information for authors about submitting articles.
The NHS offers further guidance on publishing research findings in medicine, dentistry, health and social care on the Health Research Authority website.
Did we miss something?
Let us know where else you would share your research in the comments below!