In the years before COVID-19, it was common to present research at conferences (such as the Spring or Fall National ACS Meetings). This provided students and postdocs with professional development opportunities and a valuable chance to discuss their work with other researchers and peers to ensure it got the visibility it deserved.
Over the last 2 years, the situation has changed. Most of our conferences have been virtual, and attendance at student and postdoc talks and posters has frequently been lower, with fewer opportunities for individual discussions about the research. Even as we have moved to hybrid conferences, many poster and oral sessions are less well attended. Researchers need to look at new ways to ensure their work is seen, so it has the potential to influence future research. I thought it would be helpful to share some ideas.
Figure 1.
Improving the visibility of your research publications
Pre-submission. When writing your draft publication, start by thinking about how most researchers look for new work. The dominant route is via search engines.
Search engines look for clues about the content of articles. This can be through keywords and the links these papers have. The information in your title and abstract, and the papers you cite, can all influence how your papers appear in search engines. So, as you prepare your paper, you and your coauthors should discuss what search terms they would use if they were looking for research like yours. These should be used in your title and abstract.
A key piece of advice here: use keywords naturally in your abstract; resist the urge to stuff them in everywhere. Human readers will appreciate an easy-to-read abstract that encourages them to explore your article more deeply. A well-written abstract containing relevant keywords will go a long way to making your paper appear in online searches.
Another suggestion: search engines do not understand wit, irony, literary references, or other rhetorical devices. Help them by keeping your title simple, relevant, and to the point.
After your paper appears in online searches, you need to encourage readers to click on it.
It is worth looking at how these results appear in the most popular search engines. The title is first. Then the first three or four authors and the journal name. Then snippets from the abstract appear that include the search terms used. This is why it is important to think about how people might search for your work and to use these terms in your abstract—the relevance to the reader becomes immediately obvious. The words around these keywords can provide the reader with more context and clues.
As you draft your paper for submission, consider how both machines and humans will interact with the title and abstract.
ACS journals also require a graphical abstract. This should provide an immediate summary of the key findings of your paper. It is worth asking someone with a good eye for design and visual summarization to help work on this with you. A well-written text abstract complemented with an easy-to-understand visual summary will encourage readers to dig deeper into your work.
Once you have an early draft of your paper, you might want to post it on a preprint server, for example, ChemRxiv. This will provide some early feedback so you can improve the paper before final submission to your journal of choice. It might also enable you to experiment a little with your keywords in the abstract and title—what combinations make your preprint more discoverable in search engines?
If you believe your work is truly groundbreaking and is also of high public interest, then you could discuss a press release with your publisher during the peer review process (though this may slightly delay final publication). Be aware that journalists are thinking of their readers and what will interest them. Less than 0.1% of research papers will fall into this category.
Post-publication. Your work has been published. Congratulations! Your publisher will likely be sending links to readers who have subscribed to content alerts and the article information to scholarly indexing services such as DOAJ, Web of Science, SCOPUS, and PubMed Central, to enhance its discoverability. And hopefully, your presubmission work will soon lead to your paper appearing in search engine results. But, there is more you can do to help others find your article. Here are some suggestions.
Email remains the most dominant form of communication. You might consider sending a polite message and a link to your online article to your mentors, key colleagues (perhaps those you would like to collaborate with), and people you have cited in the article. You could even put a link to your latest article in your email signature (or even a clickable banner—though use caution as this might trigger spam filters).
At ACS, we also encourage you to post your data files associated with published work to repositories, with links back to the final article. Include the article abstract with the data if the repository permits this.
Social media is increasingly important. Researchers commonly use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Consider using one or two hashtags in your posts—terms that people might actively search for. Use your graphical abstract in your posts. And, for Twitter especially, it is worth spending time now growing your list of followers so that when you tweet your papers, they are more likely to be seen. There are large numbers of chemists on Twitter, and many use this platform as a method for discovering new papers.
Different regions have different social media preferences, and the balance between platforms varies from country to country. The most well-known platform in China is WeChat, but in Korea Kakao Story has a strong presence. If you want to reach researchers in these countries, then you might want to consider joining these networks.
Scientific social media sites are also increasingly used for discovery. You and your coauthors can post your abstract (both text and graphical abstract), perhaps with a little more information, with links to the full text.
You should also post links to your publications on your institutional web page and create and maintain an ORCID and Google Scholar profile that captures your published output. If you have posted a preprint, you should link from there to the final accepted paper. You might also consider writing a blog post as a guest author on sites that are relevant to your research. In addition, if the paper is relevant, why not add it to your class reading lists?
A word of advice: if your article is open access (as it will be in ACS Measurement Science Au), then it might be tempting to post the full article on all these different platforms. But when it comes to collating statistics for your CV (usage, citations, etc.), it is easier if you have fewer places to check where people can access the full article. The publisher site will count usage from their site—so providing links that send people there will likely make your job easier in the long run. Similarly, Altmetric, the service that measures and monitors the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions, counts only mentions of the published article, not versions posted elsewhere. Another useful byproduct of sharing links to the published article (rather than sharing PDFs) is that these are counted positively in search engine algorithms: the more traffic your links create, the more likely it is that your paper will appear in search results.
A note: if you do wish to share a full-text article online, do make sure you have the appropriate copyright permission to do so.
Many publishers, including ACS, also provide services to prepare infographics, videos, and plain language summaries. These services are not free and might not be suitable for all your work; however, they can help create additional components you can post on social media and web sites. YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are notably visual social media—though, in the scientific research world, they are still somewhat underdeveloped.
As we return to a new postpandemic normal, in-person conferences are returning—often with hybrid virtual elements. Do continue to shine a light on your work in lectures or posters and share the references. It is also now possible to have DOIs for posters with SciMeetings (https://scimeetings.acs.org), the ACS service for posters presentations, that can link back to the original article.
Conclusion. Making your paper more discoverable starts when you write your paper, but there is plenty to be gained from post-publication work. As with most things in life—planning, practice, and perseverance make perfect!
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.