If you have recently published a research paper, you want to feel assured that it is going to have an impact within the relevant scientific communities. You may be hoping that the effort and time spent on the research and planning stages and the dissemination handled by your journal or publisher will be enough to translate into significant engagement and visibility. However, there are some proactive steps you can take to actively promote and increase the performance of your paper post-publication instead of waiting for readers to discover it.

1. Optimise your academic profile and metadata 

Attribution is an integral part of author discoverability. That is why you should make sure that people can associate your work with you and ensure that your research has a traceable digital footprint. 

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is an organisation that assigns individual researchers a unique digital identifier to make sure your work is distinguishable from others and that citations remain consistent, should your work receive any. An ORCID profile also centralises your publications in one location, letting readers easily discover other articles across your publishing record.  

At the paper level, you also need to optimise your metadata. This involves choosing the right keywords. Select keywords that are both specific to your article’s subject and any keyword lists or controlled vocabularies used by disciplines and online databases for indexing and discovery purposes. 

2. Make your paper open access (if not already)

Some scholarly journals still operate with subscription-based publishing models, meaning that research can be left behind paywalls and inaccessible to the public. 

Making your research open access is one way to increase the reach of your research by ensuring it is free to access for a global audience. Journals operating under fully open access or hybrid models can publish your paper as open access so long as article processing charges (APCs) are paid directly to the publisher by your institution. 

Institutions often have financial reserves allocated for turning research open access, so contact your institutional librarian for more information about the options available to you. 

3. Leverage social media tools

Social media is a great tool that is generally free for researchers to communicate their work to a global audience. 

Dedicated academic networks, such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have specific platform tools to help you share papers and track engagement metrics.  

Other social media networks like Bluesky and LinkedIn offer professional promotion in different ways. Bluesky is a quickly growing platform amongst academics that offers users curated community channels to engage in real-time discourse. LinkedIn gives you a curatable platform where you can celebrate academic achievements, seek industry collaboration, and translate scholarly material into broadly engaging personal posts. 

4. Reach out to fellow peers

As an academic, networking with institutional peers and those working in your field is a great way to build connections. After publishing your paper, this network can be useful for helping to circulate your research. 

Construct an email contact list that contains fellow peers in your institution or department and any researchers that you may have cited in your paper or used as a reference point and reach out to each individual post publication. Provide a brief overview of your paper and why you think they might be interested in reading and engaging with it.  

If your paper is open access, this makes the process of sharing easier for those you contact. 

5. Utilise graphical and video abstracts

Scientific papers contain lots of information. Additionally, there are thousands of papers published online each day. In this oversaturated publishing landscape, the importance of graphical abstracts as well as video abstracts to make papers stand out is becoming clear.  

Graphical abstracts turn complex findings into a concise and richly illustrated presentation, facilitating dissemination and understanding whilst being carefully tailored for online sharing and web browsing habits.  

Video abstracts are similarly versatile, condensing multi-page arguments into short videos optimised for media platforms and conferences. They can provide a more in-depth and accessible explanation of research, increasing its reach for a wider audience.  

MDPI Author Services offer Graphical Abstract and Video Production packages to help researchers communicate scholarly knowledge effectively, maximise visibility, and meet specific journal requirements.