How can SRA promote your published article?
Every year another 2 million scholarly articles are published. The sheer volume, and constraints on time to keep up with the literature, mean that inevitably not all of them will be widely read.
Between us, we can improve the chances of your article being found, read, downloaded and cited – of your article and you making an impact.
Should your article have a press release?
If you believe your article is newsworthy, consider writing a press release highlighting why. Focus on new or surprising facts, examples and stories that will attract interest beyond your immediate area of specialty. Drafting this before you promote your article will help you to identify compelling angles, which can then inform everything that you do. A press release is very effective at attracting the attention of bloggers and social media influencers working in your field, as well as the more traditional media.
Some articles make an important contribution to the field but will not attract attention beyond it. Recognizing the nature and potential of your own article will help you invest effort where it’s most likely to be rewarded.
Attract busy readers with visual abstracts and summaries
Video abstracts: Can your research be succinctly summed up in 2 minutes? Video is now the most popular content format, increasing engagement on social media, on websites, on blogs and marketing emails.
Social media
If you are active on social media platforms, telling your followers about your article is one of the simplest and most effective things you can do. Social media is relied upon for current awareness, by all academics worldwide.
Tips for promoting on social media
Criteria for posts vary across the different platforms, but what they all share is the need to be relevant, concise and authentic. Your followers are interested in what you have to say as an author posting on a specialist topic. Focus on interesting or unusual statistics or examples and be informal. Making your passion for your subject clear is a great way to persuade others!
Your contact networks
You may take your network of international contacts for granted, but the people who know you and your work are guaranteed to be interested in your article. Here is a selection of ideas for harnessing that list appropriately.
Reaching more people starts with your contacts
- Write personal emails to academic contacts in your field alerting them to your article and the journal, and including the link. Ask them to consider recommending it to their students and peers if appropriate.
- Do you have particularly influential contacts within or beyond this group who may share your article with their networks?
- Never email people you don’t know. Aside from Data Protection issues, they may resent the intrusion in their already overflowing inboxes
Academic promotion websites
These websites all exist to raise the profile of academics and their published work. All give excellent guidance on how you can promote your work, and all of them are free.
- Registering a profile on ORCID makes it much easier for people to find you and everything you publish, even if there are other authors who have the same name.
- Register for a Web of Science profile (this was Publons, and is now part of Clarivate). Being on this international citation network makes your work more discoverable.
- Kudos exists to help academics promote their work and reach a broader audience.
- The Conversation is an academic news website proven to increase research impact. Should you pitch your article?
- Academia.edu is a social networking service which enables academics to create profile pages and to connect with other users around the world with the same research interests.
- ResearchGate is a professional network for scientists and researchers. It helps researchers connect and makes it easy for you to share and access scientific output, knowledge, and expertise.