Enhance your research visibility

Overview

You can enhance your research visibility by maintaining your online researcher profile and by developing a knowledge mobilization plan that includes making your publications and data open. Note that enhancing your research visibility overlaps with our strategies for increasing research impact in our Bibliometrics guide.   

Knowledge mobilization

To get started, sketch out a knowledge mobilization plan in your personal researcher's journal or note-taking device. Broad questions such as “Who stands to benefit from this research?” can help make your plan work for you. To inspire your sketch, see the Guidelines for Effective Knowledge Mobilization for guiding questions as well as the infographics in Knowledge Mobilization in Practice. 

Make it “open”

• Learn about what Open Access (OA) is, how to publish OA, funding agency OA requirements alongside article processing charges (APCs), discounts and waivers (SEE: Open access (OA) publishing and more).

• Depositing your original research data in a repository allows others to build on your work, cite you, and increase your visibility (SEE: Research Data Management Guide).

Put it in Spectrum

• Graduate students make new research openly available for the benefit of society, which also increases visibility of their work. While those in thesis programs must deposit their theses, students in approved programs may deposit their graduate projects (non-thesis). As researchers, graduate students may also consider depositing articles and more (SEE: Spectrum For Graduate Students AND SEE: Spectrum For Faculty and Researchers)

• Download counts and altmetrics are available on Spectrum. 

• Spectrum is indexed by Google Scholar, OpenAIRE, and CORE

Use researcher profiles, author identifiers

The proliferation of scholarly publishing often makes it difficult to identify which published work belongs to which author. Authors with common names, name variations, or name changes may especially experience issues with accurate author metrics. 

Unique IDs can help. 

• ORCID (Open Researcher Community ID): the most-used, platform-agnostic digital identifier that can help publishers and databases differentiate between authors with similar names. Signing up is quick. Learn more about ORCID at Concordia.

• Faculty profile (if you have one): shows your institutional affiliation. Maintain your profile directly or by linking to where you keep your output up to date (i.e., your ORCID record, researcher blog, Spectrum saved searches on your name, or Google Scholar). Including your ORCID ID in your faculty profile is a best practice. 

• Researcher blog, website, or Substack: allows you to tell the story of your research process for a wider audience, while building your readership.

• Google Scholar Profile: enhances your research visibility and tracks citations. You can add your faculty profile OR ORCID record page as your profile’s homepage.

Apply institutional affiliation best practices

Ensuring your research is attributed to you and Concordia University increases your visibility. Verify that your information and affiliated university are correct during the publishing process. 

Let your readership know

• Update your profile(s) and ask co-authors to do the same. Needed when new articles come out.

• Ketchum (2022), Engage in Public Scholarship! Offers toolkits for ethically reaching readerships.

• Concordia’s Media Relations may be able to help. 

• Media relations support for faculty and researchers helps you to share your research story.