You've just published your article. Now what? Publication is just the start of your paper’s journey—if you want it to benefit others and have an impact on the world, you need to help colleagues, peers and the general public discover and understand your research. There's no better way to maximize its outreach than by laying some groundwork yourself, but promoting your research doesn't have to be difficult. Read on for our tips on easy ways to share your work.
Social Media
Sharing your research on social media is potentially the lowest effort, most impactful way to promote your work. X (formerly Twitter) for example, with its 280-character limit, is a low-effort action essentially by design, and is a social media platform geared towards conversation that is widely used by scientists.
At Wiley, we make it easy for you to share articles directly on social media via the sharing buttons for X, LinkedIn, Facebook and WeChat shown on the righthand side of every article page. After choosing your social media platform, all you need to do is write a one- or two-sentence summary and you have successfully promoted your article in just a minute or so.
To make your post even more effective, don’t forget to include hashtags in your summary and tag other people involved, such as your colleagues and research lab, as well as the journal and/or publisher. Including one or two hashtags in your post makes it visible to people searching for those hashtags, while tagging other accounts can lead to reposts and reach larger audiences (for example, @WileyInResearch has over 20,000 followers!).
If you need inspiration for how to explain your research in a more straightforward way, think back to grant proposals or presentations that might give you some phrases you can repurpose when promoting your article.
An easy alternative to writing a summary of your article is to take a photo or video while carrying out your research that you can use to promote it afterwards. People are often interested in a behind-the-scenes view, and taking pictures as you go along means you’ve already done the hard work once you get to the stage of sharing your published article. It also opens up visual-only social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Reach out to your publisher
Suggest ways that the publisher could use your research, for example, any collections it could be included in or current news topics it relates to. You can also ask for their help in running a press release. Many publishers also host intranets where you can share your research with your peers. Some publishers also run webinars to help other researchers, which you may be able to take part in to raise your profile. Reach out to a contact at the publisher to see if they have any upcoming webinars that you could take part in, or you could try suggesting a topic for a future webinar.
Your institution might also be able to help with activities like newsletters and press releases.
Use researcher platforms
It is very important to sign up to platforms aimed directly at academics such as ResearchGate and ORCiD. ORCiD provides a unique personal identifier for every researcher; once you make an ORCiD account, all of your research contributions will be stored on your profile so that anyone searching for one of your articles sees everything else you’ve published too. We are committed to linking at least one ORCiD in every article we publish as part of our mission to provide better transparency within the research community.
ResearchGate is also a brilliant platform where you can access over 135 million publications and share your own research. Once you have created a profile, you can also get in-depth statistics on who's been reading your work and keep track of your citations.
Display your public profiles as widely as possible
Once you have signed up for platforms like ORCiD and ResearchGate, make sure you include links to these profiles everywhere you can, for example in social media bios and in your email signature. You can also share links to your latest publications in these profiles, and in your email signature with a short call to action: read my latest paper on... And while social media might get all the attention these days, don’t forget the value of more personal connections—email your colleagues directly and ask them to share your latest research with their professional network as well.
Publish open access
At Wiley, we strongly believe in the importance of keeping science open. Not only does it mean new research is available to all scientists to read, use, and cite, but it is also available to the general public. This means whether it is the discovery of a new animal or a valuable insight for those working in policy or at nonprofit organizations, publishing open access means you can share your research with a global audience and maximize its impact.
On top of choosing an open access publisher for your article, you can also upload associated data to digital repositories like Figshare. When you upload images, videos and other files associated with your research output to a repository, it will be given a unique identifier that can be used to track online attention using services like Altmetric.
Want to do more?
Public interest in science is at an all-time high - if you are interested in putting in a little bit more effort to make the most of this, why not see if you can appear on a podcast to talk about your research, or write a blog post? There are lots of science podcasts out there, or you could reach out to your local radio station to see if they’d be interested in having a local scientist on. It’s never been easier to start your own blog, or you can see if the publisher or your institution has a blog you can contribute to. And if you’re feeling brave, look for public outreach events such as science comedy evenings happening near you, participate in online festivals or even start your own YouTube channel.