Regional Studies Association - Annual Meeting - Dublin 2017: increasing the reach and impact of your research
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RSA is partnered with Kudos (www.growkudos.com) to help members and authors increase readership and citations of their published research. Kudos provides two services: a platform for you to add a plain language explanation of your work (helping more people find and understand it), and a tool for helping you track your efforts to share your work (e.g. by email, in presentations, or via academic networks / social media). Kudos brings together a range of metrics (views, downloads, citations and "Altmetrics") to help you track the effect of your efforts, learn which communications are most effective, and save time in future by focusing on those efforts that correlate to improved readership and citations. A 2016 study showed that articles for which the Kudos tools had been used had, on average, 23% higher readership. Charlie Rapple, one of the Kudos founders, will lead this session, explaining how to get started and showing examples of how other regional studies researchers are using the system to increase the reach and impact of their work. The session will also include (a) some of the wider evidence that connects plain language explanations of research, or efforts to communicate more actively, with improved impact and (b) findings from the 2016 study including which sites researchers most commonly use to share links to their work, and which sites actually result in the most people clicking those links.
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Regional Studies Association - Annual Meeting - Dublin 2017: increasing the reach and impact of your research
- 1. Increasing the reach and impact of your research @charlierapple @growkudos www.growkudos.com
- 2. Explaining, sharing, measuring – Kudos Plain language explanations Trackable links for sharing Range of metrics against which to map efforts to explain and share @charlierapple @growkudos www.growkudos.com
- 3. Academia under pressure competition for funding huge growth in outputs fight for visibility and usage drive for accountability cult of impact @charlierapple @growkudos www.growkudos.com
- 4. Press offic e Press & comms PR team Communic ations team Marketing and communications Researc h offic e Research support Resea rch d evelop ment Research administrators Research communications manager Researc h outputs adviser Researc h operations REF team Imp a ct officers Imp a ct cha mp ions Project team Research assistants Co-authors Library Repository team Scholarly communications Department Fac ulty Institutes Centres Researchers Research partners Research and enterprise Knowled ge excha nge Web team Event team Social media team Funders Staff development team Public engagement offic e Who is responsible for impact? You are!
- 5. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Conferences / meetings Academic networking / profile sites (e.g.… Conversations with colleagues Institutional websites / repositories Email Social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter,… Your own blog / website Subject-based websites / repositories (e.g. arXiv,… Posts on other blogs / websites Discussion lists Multimedia sharing sites (e.g. Slideshare, YouTube) In which of the following ways do you currently create awareness of or share materials relating to your work? (n = 2,826)
- 6. Impact is built on readership … so start by helping people find and read your work
- 7. ATTENTION INTEREST DESIRE ACTION Get to know the metrics Press coverageClicks Views @charlierapple @growkudos www.growkudos.com
- 8. Learn which actions drive results ”
- 9. Communications do increase impact Nanyang Technological Institute study, 2016 Explaining and sharing via Kudos correlated to higher growth in downloads of full text on publisher sites 23% @charlierapple @growkudos
- 10. You only need name, email and password to get started! www.growkudos.com/register
- 11. …and find a publication • Some words from the publication title and part of your name • or the DOI if you know it! • TIP: use your ORCID if you have one @charlierapple @growkudos www.growkudos.com
- 12. ExplainMore discoverable; more usage, more citations Explain your work in plain language: short title, “what’s it about?”, “why is it important?” http://bit.ly/kudos-rsa-bristow
- 13. Explain people within your field to skim and scan more publications people using non-specialist terms to find otherwise “hidden” works people in adjacent fields to understand the relevance of your work to what they are doing people outside academia to get a handle on research and apply it in non-academic ways people who can access it to actually understand it! Easier for This paper argues that in the nascent theorizing and empirical study of regional economic resilience, the role of human agency has been under-explored to date. In seeking to address this gap, the paper focuses on three key questions: why agency is important in resilience; how agents are organized in complex, regional economies and how they might act; and finally, what an agency perspective means for how resilience might be conceptualized and analysed empirically. It is argued that including the human factor in resilience thinking ultimately means that the role of place and context must assume greater significance. The economic resilience of places is not just shaped by structural factors such as types of industry, but is also shaped by human actions and decision-making.
- 14. Why is it good to explain work in plain language? “Disparate studies show consistent connections between public communication, increased visibility of research, and greater numbers of citations … scientists who engage in public communication enjoy an enhanced reputation among peers” Koehne and Olden (2015) Opinion: Lay summaries needed to enhance science communication. PNAS 112 (12) 3585- 3586 dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1500882112 “Journals which publish papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper” Letchford, Moat and Preis (2015) The advantage of short paper titles. Royal Society Open Science 2 (8): 1-6. 150266 dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150266 “Short titles presenting results or conclusions were independently associated with higher citation counts” Paiva, Lima and Paiva (2012) Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often. Clinics (Sao Paulo) 67(5): 509–513 dx.doi.org/10.6061/clinics/2012(05)17
- 16. Explain 29 Add links to related ‘resources’ that help to bring your work to life, set it in context, or drive further research (code, methods, data, slides, video, press coverage, blog postings etc)
- 17. Share Kudos generates trackable links for you to share via your email, web and social networks; this gives you unique insight into which tools are most effective
- 18. Share
- 19. Measure
- 20. Measure
- 21. Compare
- 23. Time well spent When the investment of time per paper is approx 3-6 months, almost any reasonable duration is acceptable to increase the usage and citations. Research Fellow, Physical Sciences, UK 15 minutes on average more readers 23%
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Thank you for that introduction! And thank you for having me here - Sally, Daniela and the Association have been fantastic champions of what we are doing at Kudos – which I will introduce to you now.
- In the second half of my talk I’m going to look in a little bit of detail at Kudos, a free service for researchers which I co-founded 5 years ago to help researchers increase the impact of their work. Before I get to that I will provide some context, in terms of why impact is important, and some of the research in this area. But I wanted to show you this quick slide at the very beginning to help you understand the basic premise of our toolkit. Kudos helps researchers increase the impact of their work by: Providing you with a place to explain your work in language. A range of studies show that explaining your work in plain language – essentially, helping more people to find and understand it - is connected to increased visibility, higher citations, and enhanced academic reputation. Then we make it easier for you to track your efforts to share your work. We create trackable links for each of your publications. If you’re a social media user, you can connect up your Facebook, Twitter or LInkedIn accounts and actually post to them directly from your Kudos page. But you can also take our trackable link and paste it into an email, or a blog post, or a presentation, or a reading list etc. We then track where you shared that link, and how many people clicked on it, and map this against your publication metrics. What you see on the right there is our “basket of metrics” and this is the only site where you can see in one place what you did to share your work, how many people responded to that, and what effect that’s had on views of your work, downloads, online discussion and citations. We even go as far as turning this into graphs so you get a very visual demonstration of how your communications efforts have increased the readership and impact of your work.
- So now, before I get into the greater detail about Kudos, let me talk briefly about why we developed this service - why is it important for academics to increase the reach and impact of your work? Academia is under pressure in a number of ways as you know. In most countries, funding has become constrained and so winning grants is increasingly competitive. Despite this, more and more research is taking place and therefore the literature is growing at an ever faster pace. It’s increasingly hard to ensure that your work finds its audience, and yet you are expected to find an audience, both within and increasingly beyond the field – there’s a growing demand for public engagement with research, even public accountability, which has created this strong focus on impact which I only half-jokingly call a cult of impact.
- Helping academic work have impact is almost a discipline within itself. I led a workshop at a conference last year where we talked about who is responsible for impact and this jumble of people, teams, departments, professions is an attempt to summarize the conversation we had. Even just within the academic institution there are a lot of people who care about, or can play a role in, impact! But for me the most critical group here is the researchers – it’s you. You have most to gain from increasing the impact of your work, and you are best placed to do this - from being able to involve potential audiences from the earliest stages of your projects, to being at the centre of the network of people most likely to be interested in or able to act on what you find.
- So what kinds of things can you be doing to grow your impact? I surveyed almost 3,000 academics to get a sense of the activities that are most popular, and most effective. The first part of that is easy to answer – you can see here that conferences are the most common approach to spreading the word about your work, following by academic networking sites such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate, conversations with colleagues, institutional websites and repositories, then email, social networking and so on. What is harder is for people to be able to track is the effectiveness of these different activities, to determine which of them are actually helping to increase impact rather than just creating noise. That’s very much the problem that my colleagues and I set up Kudos to solve, so I’ll talk a bit more about that in a moment, but I think what this study showed is that while people still rely on trusted older mechanisms for communicating their work, they are increasingly experimenting with new approaches.
- So what should your strategy be, in terms of maximizing the impact of your work? I’m going to home in now on your publications. Because there are of course many kinds of impact – academic impact (“standing on the shoulders of giants”, at the top here), economic impact, policy impact, societal impact, cultural impact and so on. Whichever kinds of impact you seek to achieve, people can’t apply your work or cite your work if they can’t find it and read it. So the obvious place to start is to have a strategy for making sure people find your work and your publications are perhaps the most familiar and consistent output from your work, hence I see them as a starting point in this context.
- You also need to understand the metrics being used to evaluate your work. This is an area in which there has been substantial change in the last 10 years. The implications for you are two fold: firstly, it’s now much easier for you to track the performance of your own work, and indeed to track the effect of what you are doing to improve that performance – so metrics are helpful if you want to make the most of your limited time for outreach around your work, and help each effort you make to have maximum effect. Secondly, the range of metrics by which research and researchers are being evaluated is expanding, and so you’d be well advised to build up at least a basic level of understanding in this area to be sure that you understand how your work is being perceived by others, at least in this narrow sense. (Because rightly or wrongly, metrics are becoming increasingly influential as a measure of academic performance). Some of the potential metrics by which research performance is measured are more established and familiar than others – citations are obviously the most recognized measure of academic impact, and underpin widely-used metrics like the Impact Factor (for journals) or the h-index (for people). But in the digital age there are many more metrics that can be tracked and are being tracked – such as how many times your work has been shared or mentioned online, clicks and views, downloads. The attention being paid to your work – shares and mentions – is what is captured by altmetric services – you might be familiar with the colourful donuts of “Altmetric.com” Meanwhile publishers are beginning to track downloads at the article rather than journal level, and in some cases to share this with authors. Each of these metrics is important in different ways – that’s why I put them on this spectrum for which I’ve actually re-purposed the “attention, interest, desire, action” framework used in advertising and marketing. There’s a lot of debate about whether there are correlations between the different kinds of metrics e.g. does mentions in social media correlate to citations? But more important perhaps is to recognise the value of each kind of response to your work, in its own right – they are measuring different things and in different contexts you may want have a different focus in terms of what you want to achieve.
- The next piece of the puzzle, then, in terms of what you want to achieve for your work, is to understand the relationship between those metrics and your own efforts to improve them. That’s something that Kudos helps with. We bring together as many metrics as possible, in one dashboard, so that you can familiarise yourself with the metrics for your work without having to become expert in the existence and whereabouts of different metrics. You then use Kudos as the “management tool” for your communications about your work – so whether you build awareness by speaking at conferences, or emailing people, or using academic networks or social media - we show you which of those efforts are actually building attention, readership and citations. We now have over 150,000 researchers using this system – supported by, among others, the Regional Studies Association - which is building up a big dataset of how different researchers communicate, and what effect this has on metrics. So we can give you the answers as to which kinds of communications tools or techniques are more or less effective for you to build impact, helping you make more informed decisions about how to communicate, and refine what you do so that you achieve maximum impact with minimum effort.
- And one of the best outcomes from our work to date is that we can also show the overall effect that proactive communications around your work can have on its performance. A research group at Nanyang Technological Institute in Singapore are in the process of publishing a study of the effectiveness of Kudos. They took a test group of about 5,000 articles, which had been shared through Kudos, and a similarly sized control group of articles for which the Kudos tools had not been used. The team looked at average downloads of the test group articles on the various publishers’ websites, and found that, for articles where the Kudos tools had been used, growth in downloads was 23% higher on average than for articles where the tools weren’t used. So we’re helping to provide the evidence that can help you justify time spent on communications – to yourself, or to your supervisors and so on – because we can then show communications as a whole do increase impact.
- So, as promised, I’ll now take a closer look at how you can use Kudos to help you strategically manage the communication and impact of your work. It is a simple process – it takes perhaps 20 minutes the first time you do this, and then perhaps 10 minutes each time you have a new publication. You start at growkudos.com/register with a very quick registration.
- And then you find the publication you want to work on. If you have an ORCID – how many of you have an ORCID? – you can simply connect your Kudos and ORCID accounts and then all the publications you add in ORCID will automatically show up in your Kudos account. If you don’t have an ORCID, no problem, you can search for your publications using the “DOI” or your name and some publication keywords. My top tip is not to start by trying to find everything you’ve ever published. Focus first on explaining and sharing one or two publications – and then once you’ve proven that the system works for you, then you can apply the tools to more of your publications.
- So you find your publication, and have a “profile” page where you can ”explain” it in plain language by answering two simple questions: what is it about, and why is it important. We distilled the process of explaining down to these two questions because, in the research we undertook before founding Kudos, they were the questions academics told us they would find most useful in their capacity as readers trying to keep up with the literature - to be able to quickly understand the many articles they were trying to keep up with. Here is an author some of you may be familiar with – Gillian Bristow, Professor of Economic Geography and Dean of Research for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cardiff University. She’s used Kudos to explain and share one of her articles.
- Looking at the abstract for Professor Bristow’s article helps to show the value of having a separate plain language summary. An abstract has a lot of jobs to do, such as conveying the methodology and limitations of the study – the plain language summary is like a “triage” layer for a busy reader, helping them quickly determine whether they want to drill down to the next layer (the abstract) and the next layer (the full text). Note that we talk about “plain language” rather than “plain English” – researchers can and do provide summaries of their work in more than one language on our site; a summary often lends itself much better to auto-translation than the original abstract.
- Meanwhile there’s also a lot of research out there that backs up the idea that plain language explanations of research are useful. Some of the more recent studies
- Back on your publication profile page, you can also add a personal perspective. The “what’s it about” and “why’s it important” field can only be completed once, per publication, regardless of how many authors the article has. But every author can have their own “perspective”. Here’s Andras Donat Kovacs from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences emphasising his personal commitment to his field of study. We see all kinds of fascinating stories emerging through this field – people talking about who or what inspired them to specialise in their area of research, or talking about their particular role in the study and why they think the work is important from that perspective. That story can be really useful for people working in the press office or communications teams at your institution or publisher or the society – for example, if they are trying to interest the media in your work, it can help to have a bit more of a sense of the people or circumstances behind the research. I’m sure you’ve all read examples of research being reported in mainstream publications and it will often begin with an anecdote about something the person felt or noticed that inspired them. So this field is a chance to talk a bit more broadly about what you do and why – beyond the specific scope of one particular article – and show the broader story around your research.
- You can also use our “resources” area to show a bit more of that wider context. Here you can add links to all your slides, data, videos, press coverage, anything else online that relates to the work. This is a great way to create a “hub” for your work, linking together all the different outputs from and results of your research – and you can keep updating this post-publication so that the work itself becomes more than just a static record of your research at a point in time – it becomes part of your ongoing research story.
- Here’s how you generate your trackable links so that however you share your work (CLICK) – by email, academic networks, social media, conferences – you are better able to map the effect of your efforts against “meaningful” metrics – downloads, citations, altmetrics. If you use social media, it’s really easy to connect your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts with your Kudos account, and post directly to those services from within Kudos – we automatically append the trackable URL for you. If you are not a social media person, you can simply generate that trackable link (CLICK), and copy / paste it into an email, a conference presentation, a reading list, handout, an academic network, etc.
- Here’s a couple of examples of how other researchers have tweeted about their work just so you can see these “trackable links” in action.
- I know some people think “well, I can share my work in all of these ways anyway, and I can generate my own trackable links – what does Kudos add?” – here’s your answer: by managing your sharing through Kudos and our trackable links, you benefit from us putting together all of the statistics about your work including those relating to your efforts to share as well as those relating to your publications. So this saves you a lot of time and effort in terms of checking how your work is performing, or understanding whether your communications are working. I showed a tweet from Tony Bovaird on the previous slide - he’s Professor of Public Management and Policy at the University of Birmingham. He tweeted twice about this article, and here you can see that 22 people clicked on those links, 85 people viewed the page on Kudos (some coming directly, usually because of the plain language explanation being indexed by Google). 15 people have so far clicked through to read the article on the publisher’s website, his article has an Altmetric score of 1, and Web of Science shows his article has been cited 32 times. And he can see all of that here, in this one dashboard, rather than having to check separately in multiple different places that those activities are happening or those metrics are being compiled.
- As well as showing you all the metrics in one basket, as on the previous slide, Kudos also creates graphs for you, Mapping actions against results. Here’s Regis Yann Simo of the Universita Bocconi in Italy – he explained his article and shared it via LinkedIn and Twitter. This graph marks those actions with an “A” – and when you mouse over it (CLICK) a flag pops up showing you what actions you took at that point) It clearly shows the relationship between those actions and the views and downloads of his work. The activity log (I’m showing an excerpt here) also breaks down which places you shared were most effective – so you can see that 3 people clicked on his Twitter link and 7 people clicked on his LinkedIn link. That’s a common pattern - the Nanyang study I mentioned earlier (which showed that using Kudos leads to 23% higher readership) also showed that while Facebook is the channel most commonly used for sharing, typically, links shared via LinkedIn are more likely to be clicked. Kudos will give you customized, personal insights so that your decisions about where to share are driven by your own evidence of what is working more or less well. When I used to do social media training for academics in a previous job, the main question people asked me was, which platform should I use? and there was no answer to that because it depends on each individual and where the community for your work is, online. But now Kudos does provide the answer to that question because it helps you test different platforms and see where your community is responding best.
- Finally, all your publications, your actions, your metrics can be reviewed together in your Kudos dashboard. This is the only place that you will be able to see metrics for all your publications in one place, no matter where you have published or who you’ve published with, AND sitting alongside a record of your efforts to explain and share. No other service can put that all together for you. And did I mention this is free! https://www.growkudos.com/profiles/46699/dashboard
- One thing you may have noticed that I really want to emphasise is that Kudos is all about sharing LINKS to your work. You don’t upload copies of your work to our site – you add information about your work to help increase its visibility, and we always link back to the publisher website – the “click through” metrics I’ve shown in the baskets and on the dashboard are a record of how many people have clicked on the big “read publication” buttons on the publication pages. There are a number of reasons why we take this approach: Maximizing the usage of the “version of record” on the publisher site – usage counts are increasingly being considered to evaluate research, and to inform your institution’s decision about whether to continue subscribing to the journals you publish in. If you create copies of your publications elsewhere, you fragment the readership of your work so that it looks like fewer people are reading it than in fact are – that might mean people underestimate the impact of your work, or that you lose access to useful publications because it looks like no-one is reading them. It’s also about copyright compliance. We did a recent survey that showed 83% of academics think copyright should be respected, and feel uncomfortable about creating illegal copies of their works in sites like ResearchGate even though 57% of them were uploading their content, regardless of feeling awkward about it! – Kudos enables you to share links rather than copies of your work, so removes any need to worry about or check whether what you are doing is copyright compliant.
- And finally, using Kudos is not a huge effort! It takes people typically about 10-15 minutes to find, explain and share their work. As one of our users has said – in the context of the time you’ve already invested in the research and its publication, it’s well worth 15 more minutes to ensure that as many people as possible find, read and apply or cite your work. https://www.growkudos.com/articles/10.1080/14703297.2015.1058721/activity