Strategies for Enhancing the Impact of Research

Improving access and retrieval of your research study is the surest way to enhance its impact. Repetition, consistency, and an awareness of the intended audience form the basis of most the following strategies.

• Preparing for Publication
• Dissemination
• Keeping Track of Your Research

Preparing for Publication

1. Authors should use the same variation of their name consistently throughout their academic careers. If the name is a common name, consider adding your full middle name to distinguish it from other authors. Consistency enhances retrieval.
2. Use a standardized institutional affiliation and address, using no abbreviations.

Recommended Affiliation Citation
Use This:	Not This:
Mae O. Gordon Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences Washington University School of Medicine 660 South Euclid Avenue Saint Louis, Missouri 63110 United States of America	M. Gordon Dept. of Ophthal. and Vis. Sci. Wash. U. Sch. Med. 660 S. Euclid Ave. St. Louis, MO

3. Add the name of study in the title of all publications and use the same title/ name consistently.
4. Add the name of study as an author/corporate name and use the same name consistently. See NLM’s Fact Sheet: Authorship in MEDLINE.
5. Assign MeSH terms to the manuscript. (Contact your health sciences library for assistance with MeSH terms.)
6. Assign keyword terms to the manuscript.
7. Use the classification scheme and the terminology appropriate to your field of study. One example for use in Ophthalmology is the Birmingham Eye Trauma Terms (BETI).
8. Formulate a concise, well-constructed title and abstract. Include crucial keywords in the abstract. See Wiley-Blackwell Optimizing Your Abstract for Search Engines.
9. Retain rights to manuscripts that allow for maximum flexibility to re-use the work. Some rights include:
   • Post on an institutional website such as a laboratory or research study website
   • Post on an institutional or subject repository
   • Present the work at a meeting or conference
   • Distribute copies to colleagues
   • Include the work in a thesis or dissertation
   • Prepare derivative works

(If the right to post a manuscript on an institutional or laboratory website cannot be obtained, create links to the manuscript from your website using the PMID from a PubMed citation or persistent URLs/DOIs that link directly to the publisher’s website. Check with the library staff of the affiliate organization for more information on how to create links to content).

Audiences for Dissemination of Findings
Researchers and scientists Educators Clinical trial participants Health care providers Funding bodies Policy-makers Medical specialty organizations Governmental bodies Media General Public

10. Consider the desired audience when choosing a journal for publication. Topic-specific journals or journals published by a specialized society, such as RNA or Journal of Clinical Investigation, may disseminate research results more efficiently to a desired audience than general science journals, such as Nature or Journal of the American Medical Association. More specialized journals, even with a potentially smaller readership, may offer an author broader dissemination of relevant research results to their peers in their specific field of research. For more information on selection of a journal for publication, see Preparing for Publication: Factors to Consider in Selecting a Journal for Publication.
11. If your work involves potential translational medicine applications, include a discussion of how the research could translate to clinical outcomes. “Impact of journal articles will be improved if they provide a direct line of reasoning for how findings might translate into useful information for real-world behaviors or technologies. This will enhance the probability that the article will affect public policy and thus increase its impact.” See “Publishing in the Psychological Sciences: Enhancing Journal Impact While Decreasing Author Fatigue.”
12. Partner with industry for a research project. One study, “Translation of highly promising basic science research into clinical applications,” found that some form of industry involvement in the basic science publication was the strongest predictor of clinical experimentation, accelerating the process by about eightfold (95% confidence interval: 3 to 19) when an author had industry affiliations. According to "Academic medicine to the rescue," collaboration between industry and academic institutions "provides access to the best minds to solve the problem, and greater objectivity."

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Dissemination

1. Submit the manuscript to a digital subject repository. One example is arXiv which is an e-print service hosted by Cornell University in the fields of physics and mathematics. PubMed Central is another example of a digital subject repository. Investigators whose research was funded by NIH, Autism Speaks or the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) are required to submit their manuscripts to PubMed Central.
2. Submit the manuscript to an institutional repository such as DSpace@WUSM.
3. Publish “negative” as well as positive research findings. Publication of negative findings guides the further applicability of research and prevents others from duplicating research. In “The randomized controlled trial gets a middle-aged checkup,” Jadad and Rennie discuss the importance of publishing negative trial findings as well as positive findings. Principle 30 of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki reads in part, “Negative and inconclusive as well as positive results should be published or otherwise made publicly available.”

Open Access
Open Access publishers include BioMed Central and PLoS For a listing of Open Access Journals, see the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

4. Publish your work in an open access journal. Open access journals allow authors to retain rights to the manuscript to allow for many options for dissemination of the research. Open access articles often garner greater impact than traditional models of publication. See: “The effect of open access and downloads (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies.”
5. Publish your work in a journal currently indexed by PubMed. Citations in PubMed are crawled by Google Scholar. Google Scholar can help promote visibility and accessibility of your work.
6. Set up a web site devoted to the research project and post manuscripts of publications, conference abstracts, and supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, specimens, and progress reports on the site.
7. Take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization) tips to enhance retrieval of your research project web site by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Work with your webmaster to make sure your web page titles describe the content of the web page and include the name of your research project. Include meta tags in the page header section that include appropriate keywords to describe the content of the page. Search engines look at this “hidden” content and use it to determine search results page rankings.
8. Register with CiteULike or Connotea and start a “library” of publications related to a research project or by author and share the research project library with users.

9. Share the research data generated by the research and deposit research data in appropriate repositories such as GenBank or GEO at NCBI or with publishers of journals who are willing to post the data. Sharing of research data can lead to more rapid analysis and identification of genetic contributions to diseases and medical conditions. One study, “Sharing detailed research data Is associated with increased citation rate,” demonstrated a correlation between shared research data and increased citation impact.
10. Present preliminary research findings at a meeting or conference.
11. Persuade the organizers of a meeting or conference to make publicly available the presentations made at meetings; not just the published abstracts.
12. Follow up preliminary research findings presented at a meeting or conference with a published manuscript. A Cochrane Review titled, “Full publication of results initially presented in abstracts,” reported that only 63% of results from abstracts describing randomized or controlled clinical trials are published in full. The consequence of this is that systematic reviews will tend to over-estimate treatment effects.
13. Consider submitting the same article to a journal in a different language as a “secondary publication.” According to Section III.D.3. of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), certain types of articles, such as guidelines produced by governmental agencies and professional organizations, may need to reach the widest possible audience. In such instances, editors sometimes choose deliberately to publish material that is also being published in other journals, with the agreement of the authors and the editors of those other journals. Secondary publication for various other reasons, in the same or another language, especially in other countries, is justifiable and can be beneficial, provided all of the conditions are met as noted on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) website.

14. Start a blog devoted to the research project. Also check out ResearchBlogging.org. ResearchBlogging is a site that allows bloggers to not only show when they’re blogging about peer-reviewed research, but also to share that work with readers and bloggers around the world. See: “Why Do We Blog and Other Important Questions, Answered by 34 Science Bloggers.”
15. Contribute to a medical wiki such as Medpedia, Ganfyd, or Ask Dr. Wiki. Medpedia is a collaborative medical encyclopedia and only physicians and Ph.D.s are allowed to edit articles after they create an account and are approved as an editor. Ganfyd is a collaborative medical reference by medical professionals and invited non-medical experts. Only board certified physicians can enter or edit content on Ganfyd. Ask Dr. Wiki is an educational site made by physicians for physicians, medical students, and healthcare providers. For a more comprehensive list of medical wikis, consult medical librarian David Rothman’s List of Medical Wikis.
16. Contribute to a social network site aimed at scientists, researchers and/or physicians. Sites such as 2collab, BioWizard, and Nature Network allow and encourage interaction between users. These social network sites provide a forum for disseminating your research, promoting discussion of your work, sharing scientific information, and forming new collaborations.
17. Register clinical trials in a public trials registry. Registration of a clinical trial is a requirement set forth by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
18. Create a podcast describing the research project and submit the podcast to YouTube. See the Neuroscience Research at Salk Institute San Diego for an example of a podcast describing research efforts. Another option for dissemination of podcasts is BioMed Central. BioMed Central recognizes that video is an increasingly important way for researchers to communicate their results and welcomes submissions of podcasts from authors and editors. Links to podcasts are located on the BioMed Central YouTube website.

19. Consider publishing your work in the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). JoVE is a peer-reviewed, online journal that publishes videos of biological research. JoVE is indexed in MEDLINE and its content includes topics such as Basic Protocols, Neuroscience, Developmental Biology, Cellular Biology, Plant Biology, Microbiology, and Immunology.
20. If the research study group is participating with a Contract Research Organization (CRO), try to retain the rights for control and access to the research data generated by all studies.
21. Partner with publishers of non-peer reviewed trade publications devoted to the medical specialty of the research study to provide updates of research. These publications are used often by health care providers as a means of keeping current with new developments in the field.
22. Issue press releases for significant findings and partner with the organizational media office to deliver findings to local media outlets.
23. If there is a web site for the research study, provide information tailored for consumers. The 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project report, “Online Health Search” reported that eight in ten Americans use the Internet for health information.
24. Conduct outreach visits or provide seminars to other institutions/scientists, policy makers, practicing physicians and health care providers to discuss the research project.

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Keeping Track of Your Research

1. Sign up for Researcher ID, a global, multi-disciplinary scholarly research community that assigns a unique identifier to each author to eliminate author misidentification and view an author’s citation metrics instantly. See “Are You Ready to Become a Number?” for more information.
2. Sign up for other social networking sites to increase your visibility and connect with colleagues.  Some useful sites are ResearcherID, LinkedIn, BioMedExperts, and Epernicus. 
3. Check out the Author Identifier feature in the Scopus database (subscription required). The Scopus database attempts to distinguish among authors with similar names or authors whose names may have been cited differently in some publications.
4. Articles published in PLoS journals now include a metrics tab—“ Article-Level Metrics ”—that allows for evaluation of research impact. Available data includes:
• Article usage statistics – HTML pageviews, PDF downloads and XML downloads
• Citations from the scholarly literature – currently from PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef
• Social bookmarks – currently from CiteULike and Connotea
• Comments – left by readers of each article
• Notes – left by readers of each article
• Blog posts – aggregated from Postgenomic, Nature Blogs, and Bloglines
• Ratings – left by readers of each article

 

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The Primary Health Care Research Impact Project studied the impact of a sample of research projects and the pathways by which those projects affected policy and practice. The authors of the study were Eleanor Jackson Bowers, Libby Kalucy, and Ellen McIntyre, Primary Health Care Research and Information Service (PHC RIS – a component of the Australian Government Primary Health Care Research Evaluation and Development [PHCRED] Strategy); and Richard Reed, Department of General Practice, Flinders University. The study, “Pathways to Impact in Primary Health Care Research”, offered the findings to the right.

 

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Last updated: January 11, 2010