Research and researcher visibility, networking and altmetrics
It is important for researchers that their scholarly publications gain visibility. In addition to OA publishing, researchers can enhance the visibility and accessibility of their publications through forums that are used extensively. Researcher visibility involves managing information about researchers and their work in order to raise researchers’ and organisations’ profiles and to promote the visibility of their research.
Researchers’ personal methods to improve the findability and visibility of their publications include, for example, using ORCID identifier, publishing open access via OA and hybrid journals or by self-archiving, and participating in social networking services of their own field.
UEF has a service called UEF Connect for researchers and research groups to offer an opportunity to showcase their expertise and research activities. A page has been reserved for all university researchers and other experts (at the moment with staff status) where they can update their information. The address can then be linked to funding applications and used for other similar purposes. It also offers an arena for research groups to introduce themselves.
Read more about UEF Connect. If possible, log in with your personal UEF credentials to complete your information. Instructions (also in Finnish).
Networking and altmetrics
Academic social networks support activities across the research cycle, from getting job suggestions, sharing and reading full-text papers to following use of your research output within the system (i.e. altmetrics).
Traditional metrics has focused on the impact of research within academia. However, research impact is much more than that. When measuring societal impact, the focus is on the contribution research makes to society. So, research impact can be defined as the contribution that research makes to the society, economy, environment or culture. New metrics can include altmetrics, but also e.g. data citation and patent metrics. Read through What types of impact are there? to better understand what kinds of research impact exist.
Peer-reviewed journals and conferences have traditionally been the focus of researchers’ efforts to make their research visible. However, as social media has become more prevalent, the way academics disseminate their research is changing. Academics are increasingly using social media and are expected to have a professional online presence.
In the last decade there has been an emergence of Academic Social Networking Sites (ASNSs). Each site offers its own combination of tools and capabilities to support research activities, communication, collaboration, and networking. However, due to their variety, it might be challenging for academics to evaluate and use them. Also maintaining multiple profiles might be time-consuming. Thus, during this course, we hope you can find a social network site / sites suitable for your needs.
Traditional measurements of academic success, such as citation counts, journal impact factor or author h-index (i.e. bibliometric indicators, see 5. Module), might no longer be sufficient to estimate research impact, and the social importance of authors is becoming increasingly significant. Altmetrics (i.e. alternative metrics) measures a publication’s online visibility by the numbers of, for instance, clicks, downloads, blog posts, bookmarks, likes and tweets. Since most research, including journal articles, are now electronic and networked we can track how many times they are accessed, used, and shared. Altmetrics are meant to compliment, not totally replace, the traditional measures to give a more complete picture of how research and scholarship is used.
Altmetrics can answer questions such as:
How many times was my article downloaded?
Who is reading my work?
Was it covered by any news agencies?
Are other researchers commenting on it?
How many times was it shared or liked? (on Facebook, X (ex-Twitter), etc.)
Altmetrics data accumulate at a faster speed compared to traditional metrics. In disciplines where citations grow slowly, or in the context of new researchers, this speed helps determine which outputs are gaining online attention. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc. Altmetrics generally offer a faster and wider-ranging measures of how people are discussing and using your work.
Altmetrics can point researchers to interesting and more valuable research that has received most attention from other researchers and from the general public. Also, altmetrics can inform funders, policymakers and other stakeholders of the wider impact of research and give a more nuanced understanding of the impact research has made.
Use UEF Primo to search for international articles in your field and check their Altmetric score. Click See more details to find out what kind of media attention the articles have received. Two examples:
Example 1Example 2
Academic social networking and visibility services
There are several social networking and visibility platforms for academics. Acquaint yourself with some of these listed below.
Academia.edu is a free social networking platform for academics to communicate and share research papers. The Academia.edu community is the first social media service specifically for researchers, and it has already gathered more than 233 million users (2023) from around the world. The service allows its users to create a profile, upload works, select areas of interests and browse the networks of people with similar interests. Academia.edu can also be used for searching for job opportunities. In the Analytics section you can see the impact of your research.
There is also a premium version available (79 EUR / year in 2023). This allows you to learn more about your readers and get more out of your analytics, and to search grant and fellowship opportunities.
Sign up and create your profile
You can create your personal profile by signing up to the service with your own e-mail or using a Google or a Facebook account. Mobile app is available.
Share your publications and remember to check copyright
In Academia.edu, you can share your publications and access publications by others. You can also ask about and discuss academic subjects or ask for comments for your manuscript. Academia.edu allows you to follow your publications’ impact along with your academic field and its researchers. The articles uploaded into the service are well visible in Google searches.
Keep copyrights and embargo dates in mind before uploading your publications to Academia.edu. Verify from your publisher, funder or your research organisation that you have the right to share research material. If the publisher has not defined a separate policy regarding data sharing within researcher networking services, you can check publishers’ self-archiving policies in the Sherpa Romeo service (notice that uploading manuscripts/articles to these kind of networking services is not considered as self-archiving).
Is anyone noticing your research? Is someone talking or writing about it online? Is there a way to follow this?
Altmetric follows this situation using your output, e.g. article, book, presentation, report, and your identifier, like DOI, ORCID, PubMedID, URN, and mentions in followed online sources.
Following the talk about your research is crucial in our online world and plays an important role in its further impact. You can track this information as soon as you publish instead of waiting for citations.
The Altmetric badge or donut shows you in which services your research has been noticed and how much attention it has received. The data is collected from a versatility of documents and services.
The Altmetric badge appears on many publishers’ pages, search services, such as UEF Primo, organisations’ electronic repositories, such as UEF eRepo, and also on individual researchers’ websites. The idea is to follow the attention and the impact.
You can add the Altmetric it! bookmark on your browser and also use many other tools free of charge. The service also has chargeable tools.
Watch A beginner’s guide to altmetrics.
2 min 59 sec. Published on May 5, 2016. CC-BY. Illustrations courtesy of Jean Liu (@jean_draws). Icons courtesy of Noun Project and Michal Waclaw Kulesza
Huang W, Wang P, Wu Q (2018) A correlation comparison between Altmetric Attention Scores and citations for six PLOS journals. PLoS ONE 13(4): e0194962. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194962
(8/2022 TO; 8/2023 TO)
ImpactStory is an open source altmetrics tool. As a researcher you can use it to measure and share the impact of your publications and blog posts, files and documents as well as software and programs. With the provided metrics, you can can see how many times your work has been downloaded or shared, and funders can find out the effects of their input by other means besides traditional bibliometrics.
The service is linked to the ORCID researcher identifier and it reveals publications’ open access status, tells how many countries they have been read and shared in, shows which one of them is the most popular etc.
ImpactStory is a non-profit, foundation-funded organisation and registration is free of charge. They believe open altmetrics are key for building the era of web-native science. They are committed to open source, free and open data (to the extent permitted by data providers) and to transparency and open communication.
As Impactstory profiles are built on ORCID profiles and they automatically stay in sync to pull in new information and new works, an ORCID identifier is good to have in advance, if you wish to start using the service. Also a Twitter account is recommended to have in advance. See an example profile.
Impactstory achievements (Buzz, Engagement, Openness and Fun) are a way of looking beyond the numbers to find stories that matter. Further reading.
Watch a video on Incentivizing Open Science through Altmetrics
The video is a re-recording of their talk at the 1st Altmetrics Conference (1amconf) in London, UK on September 25, 2014. (9 min 44 sec)
Interested in extreme sports?
ImpactStory has published an extensive guide (222 pages) to raising your research profile.
The 30- Day Impact Challenge: the ultimate guide to raising the profile of your research By Stacy Konkiel
Upgrade your professional visibility by conquering social media,
Boost your readership and citations by getting your work online,
Stay atop your field’s latest developments with automated alerts,
Lock in the key connections with colleagues that’ll boost your career, and
Dazzle evaluators with comprehensive tracking and reporting on your own impacts.
(8/2022 TO; 8/2023 TO)
LinkedIn is a free, general and global academic, business and employment-oriented social networking service which operates via website and mobile app.
It was launched in 2003, and there are over 930 million registered members (2023). In addition to academic researchers, the members include entrepreneurs, employers and students from many academic fields, along with other types of experts.
There is a premium version available (27.75 EUR / month in 2023). This enables you e.g. to contact anyone on LinkedIn, even if you are not connected, take LinkedIn learning courses and advance your professional life.
Create your profile
Get started on LinkedIn and create your own user profile. You can also sign in with your Google account. Present your education, competences, work experience and your personal interests in different academic fields. Your own professional public profile increases your coverage on the Web and provides you versatile support in networking.
What can you do on LinkedIn?
Manage your professional identity.
Build and engage with your professional network.
LinkedIn is a meeting ground for employees and employers. Search for jobs or find new employees.
ResearchGate is a free, social networking site for researchers and other experts to share publications and data, ask and answer questions, share updates about research projects, and find jobs and collaborators.
It was launched in 2008, and there are over 25 million registered members (2023). The service makes it easy for you to contact researchers of your own academic field. ResearchGate has especially been favoured within life sciences.
Get started on ResearchGate and create your own user profile. Present your education, competences, work experience and your personal interests in different academic fields. Your own professional public profile increases your coverage on the Web and provides you versatile support in networking. Mobile app is also available.
Share your publications (responsively), and access millions more
ResearchGate allows you to share your publications (see section Responsible sharing in scholarly networks), access other users’ written works and request articles from other researchers.
The ResearchGate’s search engine extends its reach to its own systems, and also international databases (among others, PubMed, CiteSeer, arXiv and the NASA HQ Library). You can also get recommendations about groups and literature that might interest you, along with other users interested in the same subjects.
Get stats and find out who’s been reading and citing your work – ask questions, get answers
In addition, ResearchGate provides you with information about your articles that are viewed, downloaded and cited. Feel free to create projects and participate the discussions in the forums – you can ask about and comment on academic subjects and issues.
Find the right job using research-focused job board
The website also has its own listings of open academic jobs.
Remember copyright and embargo
Keep copyrights and embargo dates in mind before uploading your publications into ResearchGate. Verify from your publisher, funder or your research organisation that you have the right to share research material. Many publishers have restrictions about sharing articles on commercial social networks. Always make sure that you know which version (published, final draft (i.e. accepted version), or preprint (i.e. submitted version)) can be shared and if commercial social networks can be used. Sherpa Romeo, for instance, can be used to check the terms. Notice that uploading manuscripts/articles to these kind of networking services is not considered as self-archiving.
Also, acknowledge copyrights with downloading other researchers’ publications from ResearchGate for your personal use. The user is always responsible for using downloaded material. When needed, find out rights to use from the original source of information or ask for permission to use from the author or the owner of the publication.
NB! You do not have to post to X, if you do not want to. You can stay silent if you want to. Follow academic and scholarly tweeters and tweets to avoid getting in the middle of other debates. Start for example by following your own department if it has an account and some or all of these.
Take a look at which of the most distinguished researchers in your field are in X. Or check what comes up with hastags like #bigdata, #impactfactors, #julkaisufoorumi, #openaccess, #opendata, #openscience or any keyword related to your research interests.
Further reading
Klar S, Krupnikov Y, Ryan JB, Searles K, Shmargad Y (2020) Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of twitter for sharing academic work. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0229446. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229446
Quintana, D (2020) Twitter for Scientists [eBook edition]. Retrieved from https://t4scientists.com/. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3707741
(8/2023 TO)
There are numerous other tools and services that aim to increase researcher visibility and networking. In the previous sections, the most common ones where introduced. Here are some other services shortly explained, just as examples.
Web of Science Researcher Profiles (formely Publons). You can track your publications, citation metrics, peer reviews, and journal editing work. Publications are instantly imported from Web of Science, ORCID and bibliographic reference management tools (e.g. Mendeley). Citation metrics are also automatically imported from the Web of Science Core Collection. Publons CV summarises your scholarly impact as an author, editor and peer reviewer.
H1Connect (formerly: Faculty Opinions / Faculty of 1000 / F1000Prime). You can find recommended articles in life sciences and medicine, and see an easily digestible summary of why an article has been recommended.
Figshare is not a networking service but it is a repository where users can make all their research outputs available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner.
Societal Impact Toolkit – to help you understand how other researchers view societal impact and how they’ve been successful in creating it. Springer Nature.
