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Scholarly Research Impact

This guide is designed to help you to understand the different ways to increase and measure the impact of your research.

Building a Research Pathway

Build a pathway, or plan, for your research impact - both scholarly and non-scholarly.
  1. What are your research goals? How would you measure success?
  2. How will people know it's you even if you swap jobs? Does that matter to you?
  3. Who would benefit from this research? Is your audience broader than you think it is? Think interdisciplinary.
  4. Does your grant request an anticipated impact path? (Some do...)
  5. Have you considered publishing in somewhere that is Open Access? OA Journals receive on average 18% more citations than non open access. (Piwowar, 2018)
  6. Other than the publication, how else can you share your work? (Conferences, Twitter, repositories)
  7. Do you want to measure your impact? (H-index, citation analysis)

Where you choose to publish, share, and craft your work will be impacted by the answers to the above questions. Throughout this guide you will be pointed to different considerations and options for you to answer these questions and further boost your research's impact.

Strategy for choosing your Article Keywords and Title

When choosing the keywords and title for your article, remember that these portions highly determine the find-ability of your article. In other words, your work will appear higher in the search results when your keywords are found multiple times (keywords, title, abstract).

Keywords Tips

  1. If you know your article will be indexed in a specific database, then look to see if that database utilizes subject headings (controlled vocabulary) to categorize the indexed articles and consider for keywords.
  2. What are the most used keywords or concepts of your field? Use those if appropriate.
  3. Repeat your selected keywords in your abstract and/or title, if journal allows.
  4. What keywords were used in the articles you are referencing and consider relevant? Use those if appropriate.
  5. Run a search with you keywords. Will readers find your article searching these keywords?
  6. Librarians are REALLY good at identifying keywords so feel free to reach out to your subject librarian.

Title Tips

  1. Titles that are catchy tend to be cited more often than boring titles.
  2. Be concise (10-12 words) that contains your keywords.
  3. Avoid lesser known acronyms and jargon. Avoid abbreviations, if possible. Remember, your article may have a wider audience than you may think.
Subjects: Interdisciplinary