Boosting your work’s reach in 3 easy steps

Author: Scott Epstein

You spend most of your time working on your research—and another chunk of time working on publishing it. So to get the best return on your time investment in publishing your work, there are three broad categories of ways to boost and highlight your work to your community.

While writing

Even while writing up your results, you can start thinking about ways to extend your article’s reach once published. While putting your manuscript together, you should be thinking about your article’s title, its abstract, and also the key terms you’ll be using that your colleagues might use when searching for research like yours (which is part of search engine optimization). You can find more information about crafting abstracts and titles in this free tutorial.

During submission

When you build your submission plan, you can also think about publishing your article open access (OA). Authors who choose to publish OA have typically found a boost in their article’s usage—and citations. A growing number of Transformative Agreements and other arrangements can now either cover or defray OA publishing costs; and you can learn more about how to find funding for publishing OA. And you can also learn more about Springer Nature’s OA offerings.

More than that—you can actually start sharing and highlighting your article even while it’s being reviewed by preprinting. Not only can you preprint while submitting to Springer Nature journals, but, for a selection of BMC, Nature, and Springer journals, you can also take advantage of one-click preprinting with our In Review service.

During and after publication

Once your journal formally publishes your article, you can take further steps to raise its profile. Some easy things you can do include involving your institution and your institution’s Press Office; adding the publication to your social media; sharing your article in your academic networks like ResearchGate.

You can also take advantage of paid services (from Nature Research Solutions or our partners at AJE) to enhance your article. Some services you can get include having an expert science journalist summarize your work in plain English; or having a professional video group prepare a 1-minute, animated video abstract for your article.

Find more advice and tools

There are exciting opportunities to promote your work with social media posts, interviews, or animated video abstracts, and this post has listed only a summary of these. You’ll find more depth and detail on the author’s area on springernature.com; and you can also find free tutorials that cover these topics, as well as building a submission plan, writing in English, and more.