Researcher visibility

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 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.

Publishing your work openly can have advantages in terms of visibility and impact, as it permits wider sharing, re-use and readership. Open publishing is increasingly common, with many institutions, authorities and funders requiring it.

There are several ways to make a publication openly available, for example, archiving can be an alternative to publishing in an open access journal. You can read more about this on the library webpage Open Access – what, why, and how.

Tips

• Sharing/open access is not only for journal publications, but also datasets, code, conference posters, etc.
• Consider how open you want your publications and data to be early in the process. For publications it may affect your choice of publication venue; for data it can save you time if you work according to sharing standards from the beginning.
• To share your data you will need an organised file structure and good documentation, allowing proper reuse. You can read more about considerations and requirements for open research data and data management plans on the library pages. See also the section “Open Science” (in the top menu).

The guidance above mainly concerns your work – but are you visible? Could someone easily find your current projects, research interests, affiliation and an updated publication list? For this, your online identity is key. Researcher profiles and author IDs play a useful role. Our practical guide, Profiles and Publishing statistics, covers how to choose and set up these.

Researcher profiles allow people to easily see what you are currently working on and find more of your works. They can also be used to showcase and keep track of activities which are not well-represented by publishing, such as academic lectures, teaching, mentoring, leadership and other professional activities. Such profiles include your UiB personal page, as well as researcher profiles from actors such as ORCID, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and more.

Author IDs are unique ID codes for you as a researcher. They help separate you from other people with similar names, or gather your works published under different names. ORCID is the most widely adopted, and is used by many publishers, archives and funders.

Tips

• Take control of your online identity. It is important that the information about your affiliation, interests, projects and publications is correct and up to date. Set aside time for updating on a regular schedule.
• Try to search for yourself and see what pops up. Are there profiles with outdated or incorrect information? Select which profiles you want to actively maintain, and deactivate those you don't, being realistic about how much time you can spend on this.
• Prioritise keeping your UiB profile page up to date, as it can showcase a wide range of activities and ranks highly in search engines. For guidance on how to edit and good examples, see UiB employee pages & UiB brand guide.
• To keep a clear author identity, it can help to always publish under the same name. However, the best way is via an author ID, so we recommend to get an ORCID and provide this when possible during the publishing process. ORCID is also a good profile to record/showcase your activities, and stays the same even if you change name or institution.
• Several commercial services, such as Web of Science and Scopus, create researcher profiles automatically. You can “claim” these profiles to edit them. Whether you choose to do this or not, it can be a good idea to check every so often to avoid serious errors.

Academic social networks (for example ResearchGate and Academia.edu) can be useful to show your own research, find other research, and interact with and follow researchers. Social media, such as X (Twitter), are also used as a tool to communicate within and outside academia. Researchers may have individual profiles, or profiles for projects/groups.

Tips

• The Communication department or a local communications adviser can provide guidance about using social media and other ways to increase visibility; see communications support services at UiB here.
• Social media can be used to promote your work – you can for example link to other profiles, or to open versions of your publications in an archive, journal etc. However, be aware that there can be legal limitations when it comes to uploading full-text publications to services such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu. If in doubt, check the licence on your work or link to an archived version.
• These services are not a replacement for the UiB profile or an author ID, as they do not have the same functionality.