Research Promotion

In this Best Practice Webinar Series event, we explore threads originating in the ethnographic interviews with 25 researchers that we commissioned last spring, which we reported on last summer.  Most of the researchers who participated in that study were, by our design, early career researchers, and they told us they were at the stage of exploring publishing with different journals, and starting to form relationships with journals that would likely create preferences for future publishing choices.

How their papers were handled was, of course, part of this, but several of the researchers commented that they appreciated the ways in which journals promoted their papers in all the traditional ways. But they also mentioned, particularly, promotion specific to their own paper that used media and social media. We heard also that the usual “one size fits all” approaches- the equivalent of broadcast TV, if you will- old fashioned “e-TOCs” and the somewhat newer “tweet out all the titles” approaches were of little interest to our interviewees, as authors and as readers. These early career researchers reported that they ignore or unsubscribe from these broadcast style “e-TOCs”.

Our research is part of annual efforts and last year’s results highlighted a marked shift toward targeted approaches leveraging social: Twitter in particular. It was mentioned by nearly every researcher that Twitter is necessary to work with, regardless of their own preferences. No other platform was named by multiple researchers for the task of keeping up with an overwhelming amount of information.

Given these insights, we wondered: When it comes to promoting authors’ work, what actually has value and how can a journal make something article specific yet scaleable? In this webinar, our panelists discuss their own experiments and results in this area. Watch the video recording.