After your paper gets published, your work doesn’t stop there! There are important things you should do to increase the visibility of your publication. Check out some suggestions below and keep an eye out for creative ways that people talk about and publicize their work with the general public and their fellow scientists.
- Reach out to your institute’s press office during the embargo period and highlight your upcoming publication. It is their job to help you highlight your work and they often have professional writers on staff to help you. At MIT, this is MIT News. Coordinate with your PI to make sure that they are on board with you reaching out. Sometimes there are other factors that go into the decision about publicizing your work and you want to make sure that your PI is okay with the decision.
- Create a plain language summary of your work. This can be published on your personal website or linked to other social media promotions you link. Sometimes, writing this summary can also help you to think about how to talk about your work with the general public, even if it doesn’t get published anywhere.
- Create a tweetorial, just like BE Data Lab Fellow Pablo Cardenas did!
- Tweetorials do increase the impact of a paper, as studied and published in several papers, including this one.
- There are many tweetorials on how to create a tweetorial (meta, right?). You can use a service like Hootsuite or simply type it up in a text document to help you organize your thoughts before typing.
- When tweeting about your paper, make sure to include the following critical information: What is the paper/preprint you are referencing? What problem were you solving? What did you do? What did you learn? What is the impact? Who did you collaborate with? Try to do all of this in 5-10 tweets, certainly not an easy task!
- Create a short video and post it to your website, twitter, Facebook, youtube, everywhere!
- BE Comm Lab alum Lauren Stopfer recently did this with a publication that got accepted. She did not want to spend all day working on this, so she made a few slides in Powerpoint. She chose to use a vertical format to look like an iPhone, but this isn’t necessary. She recorded her slides and voice in Powerpoint. She got her music from taketones.com which offers free one-time personal use licenses of music with appropriate credit, and she combined the two together in iMovie and adjusted the balance of my voice and the background music.
- You can also use other services like Camtasia, Adobe Premier, or Panopto (which MIT now has a license for) to make and record movies. If you don’t want to use slides, you can make animated videos using a program like Explain Everything.
Regardless of how you do it, consider ways in which you can share your research with the world. Because once you publish a paper, the world won’t know about it until you share it.
Blog post written by Prerna Bhargava.