Strategic publishing
Choose a suitable journal
Publishing in high quality, academic journals which are prestigious in your discipline and read by researchers in the field is still an established and important method of sharing your research. You may target different journals at different stages of your career.
Use appropriate keywords
Keywords tend to be used in articles as descriptors and to assist retrieval. Consider the title of your paper and the words you use in your abstract or added keywords. Help others to retrieve your article by using the agreed terminology of your discipline.
Use the correct organisation address
Publication address standardisation will ensure that your work is correctly attributed to City University London and therefore searchable by address. Check the publisher guidelines before submission, but include details on department, school and university address. Web of Knowledge has an address search and consistency will assist with this.
Monitor bibliometrics and impact
Consider impact and peer review
Useful research impact databases include the Web of Knowledge and Scopus. If you publish in a journal indexed by these databases and is it highly cited by others, it may have an impact factor which can give it prestige in the field.
The Web of Knowledge Journal Citation Reports are useful for searching impact factors. Researchers cite each other, so look for journals that have high citation rates and possibly publish in them if appropriate. Peer reviewed journals may be of high quality and prestige.
Consider open access/ new publishing models
Use your institutional repository / research output database City Research Online where you can often post a version of your research output online. You can check Sherpa/ Romeo for publisher archiving policies. Most policies will allow you to archive a version of your work in a repository, usually the author accepted version/postprint, so do retain this. Repositories facilitate open access and can have high article downloads. Repository content can be searched in OpenDoar.
Open Access (OA) journals and those which provide an OA option give greater opportunity for wider dissemination to make your work more visible, accessible and re-usable. Because they are often free at the point of use, they can have a wide reach. The Directory of open access journals may be useful in finding OA journals.
Use descriptive metadata pragmatically by providing appropriate descriptive data about your work when submitting to repositories or journals. This will improve searchability and ensure your work is found, read and cited. It can substantially increase your citation rate, also consider what you write in your abstract to encourage people to read the whole article.
Using social media
Blogs and Twitter etc.
Disseminate your thoughts and findings using your own blog and tag your posts appropriately to encourage maximum hits on search engines. Promote your work to your Twitter followers and they might retweet your posting.
Use academic and professional social networks
Register with services such as Academia.edu and follow other people in your field. They will also begin to follow you. Networks like LinkedIn can also be used to promote research.
Update your web pages or profile
Check that your personal webpages, including your publications lists, are current and maybe have links to an academic CV on them. Add new publications as they arise.
Raise your profile retrospectively
If you are just starting to use social media, mention your previous work or make connections with your new publications.
Altmetrics
Some resources use an Altmetrics badge eg. City Research Online which indicates social media references to articles eg on Twitter. This is an upcoming method of assessing usage of an article and the impact it makes on social media.