From my Mendeley Open Office Talk on November 26, 2010. Speech bubbles have been added for better context. See the blog at http://mendeley.com/

1. Publish or Perish
Jason Hoyt, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist + VP of R&D
Mendeley Open Office Talks
26 Nov 2010
twitter: @jasonHoyt

2. Creative Commons licensed
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi
le:Ladygaga_b8dn415_1209.jpg
Academics
should learn how
to market
themselves; Lady
Gaga style.

3. MARKET YOURSELF
Or get of academia now. Visibility = Citations = Tenure
We have grant
writing courses to
help our careers,
but nothing
about marketing
our research.
Marketing in this
case isn’t a dirty
word. It’s simply
making our
research visible.

4. SELF-ARCHIVING
#1 Marketing Tool. Publishing is no longer enough.
Self-archiving
should occur
before (pre-prints),
during, and after
(post-print) we
publish

5. SELF-ARCHIVING
The juicy secrets.
58% of publishers allow it
That 58% covers 83% of all journals
41% of publishers allow pre-prints

6. WHO ALLOWS PRE-PRINTS?
A small sample.
Visit Sherpa Romeo for publisher/journal
specifics
ASBMB
ASCB
BioMed Central
Blackwell Publishing
BMJ Publishing Group
Cambridge University Press
Elsevier (except journals of Cell Press)
Humana Press
Nature Publishing Group
Oxford Journals
PNAS
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
SAGE
Springer
Taylor & Francis
Wiley
Many more…

7. WHY DO PUBLISHERS ALLOW PRE-
PRINTS?
Impact Factor Cherry Picking
Pre-prints help
publishers gauge
what they should
publish
A popular pre-
print can jump
the line in a giant
12-18 month
backlog

8. Search Engines
Search engines
are key to
marketing our
research.
This is known as
Academic SEO
(Search Engine
Optimization)

9. WHAT’S THE COVERAGE?
Catalog Journals Articles
Google Scholar 20K+ Unknown
PubMed 6,000+ 20M
Scopus (Now SciVerse) 15,000
ISI Web of Science 9,300 46M
Mendeley 20K+ 28M+ (+22M being cleaned)
People search
aggregators that
have the
coverage. Focus
on the
aggregators.

10. RANKING ALGORITHMS
Understand the
basics of how
search engines
rank literature.
We’ll look at the
biggest Search
Engines.
Mendeley,
Google Scholar, &
PubMed

11. PUBMED
1. Content Relevance
1. Title
2. Abstract
3. MeSH terms
4. Synonyms
2. ‘Freshness’ How recent is
the publication?

12. GOOGLE SCHOLAR
1. Content Relevance
2. Citation count
3. Impact factor of journal
4. Freshness of cited by
5. Who authored the paper
6. Quality of metadata

13. MENDELEY
1. Content Relevance
2. Quality of metadata
3. Readership
4. ‘Freshness’
5. Citations (future)
Quality of
metadata means
how complete is
it? Abstract, full-
text to be found?

14. Google Scholar Mendeley
?
GS favors citation
count too
strongly.
Expected result is
5th on GS.

15. IMPROVING YOUR VISIBILITY
So we’ve seen
how Mendeley,
PubMed, & GS
rank.
What can we do
to make sure our
research is
properly included
& ranked?

16. After you Publish
For Mendeley users
• Make sure we have complete metadata &
abstract at least
• Use Tags – Google will also index these on
Mendeley article pages. Remember
synonyms.
• Author keywords – Make sure they are
extracted or copy them in. Google also
indexes these
• External links. Do you have the URL to your
self-archive? Google will find these as well
as people searching on Mendeley. Use the
URL field! And use the DOI link.
• Create a public group for your paper and
similar ones. Google indexes these as well.
• When self-archiving, make sure your Web
page (or University’s) uses CoiNS and meta
tags (e.g. Eprints, Highwire). Google and
Mendeley both index these.
Before & when you publish
• Use synonyms in title/abstract
• Use vector graphics for figures/tables
text (SVG is XML and can be indexed)
Mendeley & GS will
rank papers with
abstracts and a pre-
print or full-text
available slightly higher
than those without.
If you forgot synonyms
when you published, it
isn’t too late. Put them in
the tags field on Mendeley.
People often search for
synonyms.

17. It’s a paper that I co-
authored back in the
day. I could add more
tags with synonyms.
This might improve its
visibility years after
being published. I
should also create a
public group for it.
This is from the ‘My
Publications’ folder
in Mendeley. It’s for
papers I authored.

18. This is Chris
Wiggins’ faculty
page at
Columbia.

19. His ‘papers’ link on the left
displays his Mendeley
profile. He doesn’t need to
rely on the school IT to
update his CV.
All of his papers are
updated in real-time
from his ‘My
Publications’ folder in
Mendeley

20. ETHICAL BOUNDARIES
black hat vs. white hat SEO for academia
There is a line to
‘marketing’ or
Academic SEO
that shouldn’t be
crossed.

21. FURTHER READING
Aalst, J. van (2010). Using Google Scholar to Estimate the Impact of Journal
Articles in Education. Educational Researcher 39, 387-400. Available at:
http://edr.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.3102/0013189X10371120
Bakkalbasi, N., Bauer, K., Glover, J., and Wang, L. (2006). Three options for
citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. Biomedical
digital libraries 3, 7. Available at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16805916
Beel, J., Vlba-lab, F. I. N. I. T. I., and Wilde, E. (2010). Academic Search Engine
Optimization ( ASEO ): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar &
Co . Journal of Scholarly Publishing 41. Available at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.41.2.176
Mikki, S. (2009). Comparing Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science for Earth
Sciences. Scientometrics 82, 321-331. Available at:
http://www.springerlink.com/index/10.1007/s11192-009-0038-6

22. Publish or Perish