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Measuring Research Impact

Improving your Research Visibility

Make your Research Output Open Access

Publishing in Open Access makes outputs freely available online so that they can be downloaded, read and re-used in accordance with licensing. This means that the potential readership of open access articles is far greater than articles restricted to subscribers, so your articles are much more likely to be downloaded, shared and cited.

Check out MU's Open Access Repository called "Maynooth University Research Archive Library" (MURAL)

For a global directory of Academic Open Access Repositories & Policies look at Open DOAR

For listings of Open Access to Publish in, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is really useful.

Sharing your research data and making it more accessible and visible can also result in wider citation of your data and research.

Think carefully about where you publish

Other Useful guides

Improving your articles Search Engine Discoverability

Getting Started

Update your Profile on the Maynooth University Research Information System

Sign up for a ORCID identifier. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognised. Check out the ORCID knowledge base.

Create a Google Scholar Citations Profile:  Google scholar citations allows authors to track citations to their scholarly works and to calculate numerous citation metrics based on Google Scholar citation data.  By setting up a profile, you will be able to disambiguate yourself from authors with the same or similar names and make yourself more findable on Google.

Create a Research Profile using  Researcher ID (now Publons) on the Web of Science Database available via the Libraries A-Z of Databases. Register with Web of Science to begin this process.

Check your Author ID on the Scopus database to make sure your details are correct. This identity is automatically generated if you have publications on Scopus.

Promote your Research Online using Academic Social Networks

 

The A-Z of Social Media for Academia : is a really useful and current listing of Social Media Platforms available to you. It's produced by Professor Andy Miah,Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, in the School of Environment & Life Sciences, University of Salford, Manchester.

 

 

 

Academic Social Media (Academia.edu, Research Gate)

Publishing Strategically to enhance your Research Impact

How to get a paper published in a high impact journal

eBook "The 30 day Impact Challenge" by Stacy Konkiel

Make your work findable

  • Metadata
    • Metadata describes a research output, making it easier to find and use. For example, metadata may include a title, author, file format, date published, subject keywords, or an explanation of how data was collected.
  • Make you publications easier to find by using effective titles, abstracts and author keywords in your publications
    • Clear/concise  use of language, that has your keywords embedded into it to ease searching
  • Research Data should be made available, details here
  • Websites & Blogs
    • Link your article once it’s published from your personal webpage, blog, social networking sites, and from your Maynooth University academic profile. This will help to make it more discoverable on search engines.
      • If you have a personal website or blog you can improve its ranking in search engine results by considering elements such as: keywords in body content
      • keywords in title tags, meta tags, and heading tags
      • including links to external websites about similar topics

 

 

Correct Author Attribution

A limitation of citation-tracking databases is the different ways authorship is attributed. Problems can stem from data errors, name ambiguity, and how multi-authored articles are attributed.

  • Misspelling your name or errors in institutional attribution are sometimes found in citation-tracking databases. 
  • To reduce name ambiguity, all authors should define their identity convention as an author early, and use that convention systematically.
     
  • Citation-tracking databases attribute authorship of multi-authored articles differently, as it may be attributed to all of a publication's authors equally (full counting), or by giving relative weights to authors in collaborative publications (fractional counting).

Use the correct MU Affiliation format in your publications

Publication behaviours across disciplines

Publication behaviours across disciplines, with Neurosciences and Life Sciences having high frequency of publications, length of reference lists, and number of co-authors. Further, Mathematics, Computer Sciences, Arts and Humanities having low frequency of publications, length of reference lists, and number of co-authors.

  • Research Output, Productivity and Impact will vary across disciplines
  • Citation tracking databases do not have equal coverage across the disciplines