Promoting & Marketing

Actions taken during the publishing process can help maximize the visibility of your work and help you be a greater positive influence in the world. The following are recommended:

• Make your work more discoverable to searchers.
• Ensure your work is attributed to you and the university in a consistent way.
• Choose to publish your work so that it is openly accessible to the public.
• Promote your work via social media and other avenues.

Discoverability

Searchers use titles, abstracts, and keywords to find papers relevant to their area of research; therefore,
Use descriptive words in your paper’s title and section headings.
Don’t sacrifice understanding for cleverness – titles can be eye-catching and clever but should use words that adequately tell searchers at a glance what the paper is about.
Supply keywords to describe your paper, which align with indexing terms used by important databases in your discipline.

• Use subject-specific headings or controlled vocabularies:
  
  • Medical terms (MeSH): https://meshb.nlm.nih.gov/
  • Transportation terms: https://trt.trb.org/
  • Electrical/Electronics terms: https://www.ieee.org/publications/services/thesaurus-thank-you.html
  • Other: search your discipline’s bibliographic database for its thesaurus (e.g., EI Compendex for engineering disciplines or EBSCO’s Business Source for business)
• Use Library of Congress Subject Headings (https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html)

Attribution

Searchers use names of authors or institutions working in specific fields to keep track of their ongoing work; therefore,

• Standardize the way you represent your name in your work, insofar as permitted by the publisher.
  
  • Consider creating a unique author ID: see [link to Author ID page].
• Standardize the way you represent your institution.
  
  • Consider using Brigham Young University rather than BYU, Brigham Young, College of Life Sciences BYU, etc.

Open Access Publishing

Researchers preferentially use research that is openly accessible to them [reference]. Moreover, publishing research in a journal that is behind a paywall limits access to the general public. Therefore:

• Consider publishing in an open access journal (see [link to OA section] and Directory of Open Access Journals).
• If not publishing open access, ensure that you retain certain rights in your publishing agreement (see also [link to Publisher Agreements] and The SPARC Author Addendum (https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/)). These may include rights to:
  
  • Post your work in an institutional repository (see ScholarsArchive section).
  • Distribute copies of your work to colleagues and students in the course of research and teaching.
  • Create derivative works from your original work.

Promotion

Connections with online communities can be effective means of providing visibility to work, both in-progress and completed. Consider using one or more of the following venues for promoting your work:

• Professional networking platforms (e.g., LinkedIn)
• Professional listservs
• Social media
• Google Scholar profiles (personal or organizational)
• Preprint servers

Note that it is generally better to consistently engage with a community on one platform than provide a sporadic voice on many.

Best practices for utilizing such online platforms include (see also https://brand.byu.edu/social-media):

• Have a clear vision of what you wish to accomplish with your promotional efforts, and craft your message accordingly.
• Represent your institution and your sponsor(s) in a manner consistent with their ideals and purposes.
• Plan on receiving both positive and negative comments. Set and adhere to standards of conduct for discussion and be respectful and consistent in responding to those who take the time to provide feedback.

Other resources include:

• Broader Impacts - BYU Research Development
• OSF | Best_Practices_Increasing_Visibility_Researcher_Scholarly_Activities_Final_Version.docx