Marketing your papers to make an impact: poll conclusions

The poll was posted in March 2013 in many academic discussion groups. Around 650 answers were collected and many hot comments. The question was:  What do you do MOST to increase the probabilities of your papers to be cited? And the results are:

• Include the papers in your website and social profiles                                28.0%
• Publish in indexed and open access journals                                                25.4%
• Distribute  research early as working papers or tech reports                     16.0%
• Active selling (promote it on web discussions, blogs, etc.                          12.2%
• Other activities                                                                                                         4.2%
• I do nothing                                                                                                            10.0%
• I do not believe in impact indicators                                                                   4.2%

I have two comments. The first one is about the activities undertaken by professors, that apart from those mentioned above, it has also been discussed some others:

• Publish with other scholars could help to increase the impact of the article. Research suggests that an article with co-authors is more cited than articles with just one author.
• Be really strategic about your abstract and your title. Put key words in your title that will make them more likely to be picked up by search engines.
• Twiter. Here I would mention that active selling in general is a laborious task, it is not enough posting it once at each website or discussion, it should be done regularly and with originality to not be a pain in the neck.

The other comment is on the activity of marketing your articles itself, it has not been accepted as expected, since for example almost 15% of the professors do nothing or do not believe in this citation system; particularly among the publishing industry professionals, which have come to qualify this activity as “snake oil salesman”, although they should be delighted, because professors are willing to be involved in disseminating their publications.

My conclusion is that, although the main focus should be on research and writing good papers, of course, the current imperfect but vital citation system prompts us professors to take action and be active sellers of our publications. Who dares to suggest professors to do nothing? To be passive?