You have just got a paper published in a prestigious journal. That is fantastic news for your academic career!
But what do you do after your paper got published to further disseminate your research?
Relying on the publishers to promote your research can be a risky approach, simply because of the volume of articles they publish every day. If you do not disseminate your research further, the impact of your research may be hindered, and less potential users of your research will be reached.
In my previous article on “publish or perish” culture, I mentioned that some academic papers do not get cited at all. The quality of research plays a crucial role in such an outcome.
However, I do believe that you can ensure your research gets noticed and read by a broader audience if you embed research outreach, dissemination and engagement activities in your day-to-day work.
I saw a substantial increase in engagement with my research after I started making my research open access and sharing it via social media.
I do believe that this will increase the impact of my research in the long term. I expect that this will have a positive influence on the number of times my research is cited and enable me to engage with the audience who may use my research in practice.
Table of Contents
Why you should disseminate your research on social media?
Considering social media in your dissemination strategy is crucial to increase the impact of your work and enable engagement with your audience.
Allen et al. (2013) suggest that this is because social media platforms shift the mode of your dissemination activities from a “pull” model to a “push” model.
The “pull” model relies on researchers interested in your research area to search for relevant information. For example, they may be searching for a specific phrase using research tools like Scopus during their literature review.
The “push” model allows you to feed the outcomes of your research directly to researchers in your network. This means that you make your audience aware of the critical findings of your work. As a result, they are more likely to use it in their work. They may also reshare your work, helping your research to reach even more prospective readers and users that you would not reach with “pull” model.
The analysis performed by Klar et al. (2020) confirmed that research article that was shared on Twitter at least once received 4 more citations that corresponding article that was not shared.
Regression analysis by Klar et al. (2020) suggests that tweeting information relevant to your paper will increase your citations.