Researcher visibility
The visibility of you and your work can be improved by thinking strategically about publishing and your online presence. Here you can find tips and guidance for a solid start.
Main content
Your work has the best chances of having an impact when it is available and visible for others. Having a thought-out strategy for publishing and your online presence can help!
The aim of this strategy is to make good choices during the publishing process, as well as keeping visibility in mind during other phases of research. While publishing, it can be useful to think about not just where you will publish, but also how to ensure your publications are easily searchable and whether to make your work and data available. Outside of publishing, you can think about which researcher profiles, social media or other channels you can use to make yourself and your projects visible.
Below you will find tips and resources about these things. For more practical, how-to guidance on setting up a researcher profile and finding publishing statistics, please see our guide "Profiles and Publishing Statistics".
Writing titles and keywords
Titles, abstracts and keywords are important for attracting the interest of your potential audience, but they also play a role in whether your publication will be found when others do a literature search in databases or library catalogues. Consider the balance: A solid, descriptive title including relevant terminology may make your work more findable in a literature search, but a catchy short title may grab attention and promote sharing.
Tips
- It can be an advantage to include key relevant terminology in the title of your work, as this may improve your publication’s position in search results. Bear in mind that starting a title with punctuation (e.g. #) or metaphors can reduce its findability in searches.
- In the abstract, remember to include terms that are likely to be used by someone who is searching for your topic. This will ensure your work is in their search results.
- Many venues also ask you to choose some «keywords» to describe your work. Use this chance to improve findability by including relevant terms, writing out acronyms, or adding synonyms.
Choosing the right venue to publish in
Choosing your publication venue carefully is a good idea: Publishing in the right place may help you reach your targeted readers and avoid the pitfall of working with unserious or predatory journals/publishers. The publishing landscape is also undergoing a transformation, in for example the actors involved, payment models, and evaluation, and it is therefore particularly important to consider where, when and how you want to publish your work.
The scientific norms of your field, together with your motivation for publishing, play a role. Quick sharing of your results may be achieved though publishing a preprint in an archive, while getting your work published in a quality peer-reviewed journal may be important for your track record. But relative importance and practices vary by field, for example in choice of format, open access, and how “high-quality” or prestigious journals/publishers are regarded.
Tips
Ask critical questions when evaluating a journal, publisher or other venue. For example:
- Who is the target audience, and how likely am I to reach them in this venue?
- What experience do you and your colleagues have of reading or publishing with this venue?
- What do you know about their peer-review process?
- Is this journal indexed in databases which you use to find literature?
- What guidelines and costs do they have connected to open access and archiving?
You can find useful information and comments from researchers in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers. Each publication venue is assigned one of four "levels" in the register, which can be used to help evaluate if a venue is serious/trustworthy.
You can find further advice about choosing a publishing venue on PhD on Track and ThinkCheckSubmit.