Below is a pdf version of the "Good Practice: Increasing Research Visibility and Reach" booklet. If you would like a physical copy of the booklet, or would like more information and help with improving your academic impact please contact the Research Support Team.
Increasing your research visibility makes it more likely:
There are lots of ways to increase your research visibility, and we'd encourage researchers at all stages of their academic careers to consider the below suggestions:
Our Citations 101 video below goes into more detail on these suggestions. You can also view a series of videos with some tips about increasing the visibility of your research here.
Citations are often used as a measure of research visibility, as they demonstrate where other researchers are citing your work. Citations are created when someone references something in a document. All resources that you use should be cited, including data, articles, books, conference papers, websites etc.
How to cite things correctly depends on your department, or the requirements of the publisher or journal. To learn more about how to cite things correctly, please visit our referencing page.
The below video introduces citations in more depth, including explaining the limitations and strengths of using citation analysis.
Citations are used to measure impact from the academic community, and are also often used in league tables or as a way of measuring research performance. It should be noted that citations alone are not a sufficient way to measure research performance, as what makes a 'high impact' publication varies a lot between fields.
More information about this can be found in the video below.
Bibliometrics is the term used when talking about measuring academic impact (citations). Several databases offer tools to analyse citations, however most of these are subscription based. Google Scholar is a free tool, but the information is limited and you have to create a researcher profile in order to access information about your citations.
Please note that the citation information in the database you use is limited to the database only. For example, Scopus only analyses publications from its own database, Google Scholar only analyses publications that are indexed in Google Scholar, and so on.
The University of Essex subscribes to Scopus and SciVal, two tools that can help you get an overview of citations on various levels, from researchers to institutions and countries. If you would like more guidance on how to use these tools, please get in touch with the Scholarly Communications and Research Support team.
For more information about the range of different metrics that can be used to demonstrate and evaluate research impact, have a look at the Metrics Tookit.
Citations are not the only way you can measure research visibility. There are a variety of other metrics that can give you a broader picture of how your work is being seen and used.
You can find out more about these tools using the tabs above.
You can use Overton for tracking and evidencing policy impact. Overton is the world’s largest searchable policy database, which tracks everything from white papers to think tank policy briefs to national clinical guidelines, and automatically finds the references to your scholarly research, academics and other outputs.
It looks for the names of any researchers on expert panels, who are quoted in policy documents, who give evidence to committee hearings and more. Importantly it can also find the links between policy documents – often research is picked up by intermediaries like think tanks and agencies – giving you unparalleled insight into the dynamics of policymaking.
Overton is used by researchers to study the dynamics of real world policymaking and also to track the impact of their own work on policy.
You can find more information about using Overton here, including how to set up an account and further training & support.
Note: Altmetric uses the DOI to track your work, so ensure that it is included whenever you share it (e.g. on social media, in the news, or on blogs).
Altmetric provides a free tool that you can use on article pages with a DOI to show you the Altmetric Score for that article. If you have an ORCID and it's up to date, you can quickly go to each of your publications using their DOIs and check them in turn with the Altmetric tool.
You can then click through to the Altmetric page for that article. This page displays a summary of the article information, a graph of mentions over time, and tabs with more information about mentions.
Each tab next to the Summary tab will show you the mentions of that type and allow you to go to that mention on that platform. This can be a great way to not only see where your work is being talked about, but also jump straight to it so you can either join the conversation, contact the authors, or reshare their mention to amplify the attention further. It also shows the citations count from Dimensions.
Using the graph on the Summary tab, you can see when there has been engagement with the publication. This can help you to see patterns, such as what was going on that may have led to increased engagement. You can also see the impact of things you may be doing. For example, if you started posting more regularly after a particular date or tried a new style of content, you can see how things have changed.
Each tab next to the graph timeline view will give you more context to the mentions, for example showing you where the mentions came from in the world, breaking down the audience, or explaining how the article is performing in comparison to others. Again, this can be useful for understanding your audience and where to put your efforts. For example, if it's particularly popular in a certain country or career stage, tailor what you're doing to maximise that, or alternatively adjust to broaden your appeal.
Altmetric has further guidance on how to interpret the Altmetric Donut and other data they provide as well as some tips for using the information to improve your visibility effectively.
Citation cartels and citation stacking are examples of ways editors, researchers and journals are trying to increase their academic impact (citations) by gaming the system. Being involved with a citation cartel or engaging with citation stacking can be extremely damaging for your credibility as a researchers so it is strongly advised that you refrain from doing so.
You can use the buttons below to find out more about Citation Stacking & Cartels:
Citation stacking is when academics cite themselves to get more citations or when a journal asks academics who submit their manuscripts to add references that are from the same journal to increase the citations to the journal. However, this is now very easy to discover, and so citation cartels have emerged.
Citation cartels are groups of people or journals (usually editors of the journals) who agree to cite each other in order to boost the impact factor of the journal. Journals usually do this during the peer-review process by suggesting that academics add a lot of references to their manuscripts that are from two or three other journals – these journals will then return the favour.
If someone asks you to cite irrelevant research in your work please get in touch for advice.
Read more about Citation Cartels & Citation Stacking here:
Except where otherwise noted, this work by University of Essex Library and Cultural Services is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
