Month: May 2021

The following steps might be a good way to improve your online visibility as a researcher and assist you with communicating about your research:

1.  Create and maintain online profiles (e.g. Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Academia).
2.  Use persistent identifiers (e.g. ORCID, Researcher ID in Publons, DOIs) to disambiguate yourself as an author or to link to your work.
3.  Publish in Open Access journals or choose Open Access options.
4.  Use Creative Commons licenses for your work for re-use.
5.  Self-archive pre- or post-prints to institutional repositories (SUNScholar).
6.  Publish your data to data repositories (SUNScholarData).
7.  Make social media engagement about your research a regular habit (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter)
8.  Engage your audience in meaningful conversations about the topics that you are interested in.
9.  Connect with other researchers by means of academic network tools (ResearchGate, Mendeley, etc)
10.  Appeal to various audiences via multiple publication types (academic articles, news items, blog posts, magazine articles)

It will be important to check in on your goals often, at least once in six months, or when you have published a new article.

Get help:
Marié Roux
Faculty Librarians
Research Commons Librarians

Sources:
Library guide: Research Impact & Scholarly Profiles, University of California, Berkeley Library
Library guide: The Research Process: Improve your impact, Stellenbosch University