Research Impact: How can I make my work more discoverable?

• Databases and search engines give words in titles, abstracts, and keywords the most weight and may be the only searchable part of the article.
• The title and abstract should attract and capture the would-be reader. Give them the punch line.
• When adding author keywords, choose words that complement title words, not the same words. Consider highlighting the population or unique methods.

• Provide multiple points of access to your scholarly work while complying with license agreements and funder policies.
• Preprints in repositories such as bioRxiv and SocArXiv are captured by search engines such as Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar, as well as by some disciplinary databases such as Engineering Village and Europe PMC.
• Author-accepted manuscripts deposited in disciplinary repositories (such as PubMed Central) or institutional repositories (such as UW's ResearchWorks) can also be found through search engines, links from your departmental or lab web page.

Examples:

• Consider podcasts and video storytelling, infographics, social media stories, different approaches to data visualization, and community forums.
• Submit stories to UW News.
• Contact your UW public information officer and ask to be added to the "experts list" for the news media.
• Work with The Conversation.
  • Their journalists help academic experts write for the public.
  • The stories they publish are free to read and free to republish under a Creative Commons license.

  • All their stories are picked up by Yahoo News. Sometimes they're republished in other news outlets and magazines.

University of Washington Press Digital and Open Access Projects

MIT Press 2024 report on its open-access books.

• Their "open access Humanities and Social Sciences books are used 3.75 times more and receive 21% more citations than their non-open counterparts."
• Their "open access STEAM books are used 2.67 times more and receive 15% more citations than their non-open counterparts, on average."

• Some journals offer open access publishing as an option; some journals only offer open access publishing.
• If you're a UW author interested in publishing with an open access journal, please check to see if reduced Article Processing fees are available.
• If your journal is not listed, you may be able to deposit your accepted manuscript in UW’s ResearchWorks repository at no cost.
• The UW Libraries do not have a central fund to finance open access article publishing for individuals.

Sharing research methods and data provides more access points for your work.

Cite your work and include the DOI if available.

Examples to consider:

• Protocols.io for lab protocols
• GitHub for code
• Disciplinary repositories or Dryad for research data
• Open Science Framework for study protocols and project information.

Consider presenting at conferences and publishing in journals of your target audience: researchers and practitioners.

Resources:

• Research Communication Project at the Hamburg Research Academy
• Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research (ebook)