The importance and means to increase the visibility of your research output

Taha Ahmed
April 14, 2014

ÅABC, Strukturkemi, Uppsala universitet

URL for slides: goo.gl/yFhkCX
DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.997729

Some slides adopted from ORCID outreach resources

What do we mean by research output?

Any product (of research activity) that is commonly accepted in the scientific community, such as

  • articles in scientific journals
  • talks (i.e., slides, video)
  • theses
  • posters
  • datasets
  • code
  • …

Papers: shared in scientific journals

  • Very long tradition
    • First systematic publishing of scientific research results (1665 in England, France)
    • Has seen major changes in the last decades (computers, internet)
  • Currently, ~50 000 scientific journals operate worldwide (~30 000 indexed by WoS+Scopus)
  • 66 million DOI links indexed by CrossRef (Apr 2014)
  • Well-established methods exist to track citations of your papers
  • Growing pains
    • how to keep track of individual researchers, as they change institutions, get married, or even switch fields?

What about other research output?

  • actively sharing research output is good for the field, and for the individual researcher
  • previously, there was very little incentive to do so
    • uploading material to personal website or similar
    • no tracking of impact of shared material
  • but a lot has happened in the last few years

A word of caution

  • There has always been and always will be companies trying to peddle their latest and greatest solution to all your problems.

  • In the end, they mostly fail, taking all your spent time and effort with them down the drain.

  • But when the whole community comes together around a solution, the chances of it holding up to the test of time is much greater.

  • And always consider who the stakeholders of an enterprise are.

Who cares about visibility?

You do!

Visibility, or in other words: attribution

  • Science is a communal effort, where new work either incorporates or refutes previous work
  • Attribution is therefore critically important, and intimately linked to the concept of impact

It used to be that tracking the impact of all your research output was tedious, time-consuming, manual work and hardly worth it except for the academic superstars.

This is rapidly changing.

  • ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.
  • figshare allows researchers to publish all of their data in a citable, searchable and sharable manner.

ORCID.org

figshare.com

There are many other solutions out there