How to Reach a Wider Audience for Your Research

"By engaging with audiences, you many enter into conversations that lead to the co-creation of knowledge. This means not just a larger audience and higher metrics for the researchers themselves, but better and more relevant research for developing regions."

This online guide offers practical advice on how academics can make the most of the opportunities provided by "altmetrics", which is short for alternative metrics, in gauging the impact and reach of their research in the social web. This non-traditional way of evaluating scholarly "impact" goes beyond traditional citation counting, enabling researchers (especially those from developing countries) to take advantage of what social media and online platforms have to offer: the opportunity to reach, analyse, and engage with the social and public dimensions of scholarly work.

The guide provides several concrete tips with detailed steps and links to further information online. For example:

• Make your research discoverable by publishing in open access journals, self-archiving your work, making use of pre-prints, publishing all your outputs (e.g., put your slides in Slideshare), and curating your metadata.
• Identify who your work is reaching and the places where it is being shared, discussed, and cited by making use of (persistent) identifiers such as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers), keeping a record of all your outputs, setting up profiles that track your reach for you, revisiting your work regularly (e.g., to check for conversations about your work in the comments section), setting up alerts to notify you of mentions, searching Twitter following publication, and noting who mentions your work and where.
• Engage with individuals from within and beyond academia, as well as within and beyond national boundaries, by being active on social media, reaching out to readers, and speaking at conferences and colloquia.
• Grow and nurture your online presence by making your research as widely and openly accessible as possible - i.e., use a consistent online identity, claim your Open Researcher and Contributor ID (better known as ORCiD), set up multiple online profiles, write a blog, set up a personal domain name, and share your identity (e.g., include your Twitter handle in presentations).

The guide concludes with several links for those interested in learning more about topics such as open access, research visibility, and social media.