Earlier this week the Library presented a workshop on Maximising your research impact. You are welcome to view the powerpoint here, but herewith also a short summary of important steps to take:

Make sure to publish strategically

  • Carefully take note of the Instructions to Authors of the specific journal
  •  Be careful of predatory publishers
  • Publish Open Access, not only your final product, but also your research data (SUNScholarData), code (Github), software, presentations(Slideshare), working papers
  • Journal metrics: Use Web of Science or Scopus for analysing journal metrics in order to make sure you publish in a high impact journal (Journal Impact Factor, Citescore, SNIP, Scimago Journal Rank, etc)
  • Make sure the journal is accredited to receive subsidy from the DHET
  • Create a unique author identifier to ensure that you are able to track citations to your research and that your research can be found continuously (ORCID library guide)

Measure your author and article impact

  • Citation analysis is a way of measuring the impact of an author, an article, by counting the number of times that author, article or publication has been cited by other works.
  • Use different author metrics and not only the H-Index (G-Index and M-Index for example)
  • Also consider other aspects of a candidate’s career, such as discipline, and how many collaborators a researcher works with, etc.
  • Remember to measure your social media posts, media mentions, readers, downloads of articles, etc. with Altmetrics (Altmetric.com, Plum Analytics in Scopus and Ebsco, ImpactStory, etc)

Networking: Know how to find collaborators

  • ResearchGate
  • Academia
  • Social Science Research Network
  • Mendeley
  • LinkedIn

Promote your work with Social Media and other public engagement

  • Actively make time for public engagement
  • Use Facebook, Twitter to promote your research
  • Start a blog or personal website about your research/research group
  • Learn about which research will make the news: Newsworthy-infographic

Other useful reading on the topic:

Maximizing your Research Impact

And:

Taylor and Francis’ author guide

University of Berkeley Library Guide


Need any assistance?

Contact: Marié Roux