Research Metrics

Increasing Research Visibility

The academia is changing. Previously, researchers were to "publish or perish", but this may have been replaced by a new mantra "be visible or vanish". On this page, you can find some possible ways to enhance the research visibility of your work.

Open Access

Open Access Publishing

By publishing Open Access (OA), you make your publications freely available to anyone to read and re-use. This can bring benefits such as increasing the exposure of your work, allowing practitioners to apply your findings, boosting citation rates, and more.

For more details, check the guide at: https://libguides.lib.hku.hk/openaccess

Preprint

You may consider depositing your paper on preprint servers to increase the visibility of your work, which may bring benefits such as enhanced speed and citations. There are a number of preprint servers for publishing preprints across different disciplines.

For more details, check the guide at: http://libguides.lib.hku.hk/preprint

Research Data Sharing

Research found that sharing research data is positively associated with increased citations (Colavizza et al., 2020; Piwowar et al., 2007).

The Libraries provides an institutional data repository, HKU DataHub, for researchers and research postgraduate students to publish research data. HKU DataHub is a cloud platform open to global where people can share, store, cite, and discover a wide range of research materials. Materials uploaded to DataHub will be indexed in Google Scholar and Google Dataset Search, which would also help to increase the discoverability of your data.

For more details, check the guide at: https://libguides.lib.hku.hk/researchdata/datahub

References

• Colavizza, G., Hrynaszkiewicz, I., Staden, I., Whitaker, K., & McGillivray, B. (2020). The citation advantage of linking publications to research data. PLoS ONE, 15(4), e0230416. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416
• Piwowar, H. A., Day, R. S., & Fridsma, D. B. (2007). Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLoS ONE, 2(3), e308. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000308

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy to improve the discoverability and search rankings of your paper in different search engines such as Google, google scholar, PubMed, and IEEE Xplore, etc. If you want to boost your readership to a wider public, you may try to optimize the search results for your work. 

Search engines return search results by analyzing the keywords, metadata, and other contents in your research paper with their sets of algorithms.

1. Title

• Keep the title succinct.
• Include the most relevant keywords or phrases in the main title rather than the subtitle.
• Place the most important terms at the beginning of the title.
• Avoid special characters.
• Avoid abbreviations unless they are well-known.
• Do not overstate your results.

2. Keywords

• Use a thesaurus to help you find adequate keywords, e.g., discipline-specific thesauri (Medical Subject Headings, MeSH and Embase Subject Headings, Emtree) and Google’s keyword tools (Google Trends, https://trends.google.com/trends/).
• Alternate broader or narrower terms. If a narrower term is used in the title, use the broader term as a keyword.
• Provide additional information that is not obvious from the title.
• Use specific, meaningful and unmistakable terms.
• Use the singular form.
• Use three to seven keywords per article.

3. Abstract

• Include the most important terms referenced in the article at the beginning of an abstract.
• Write in an informative manner - include the study design, the results, and the relevant terms.
• Write in a clear, precise, and succinct manner
• Avoid abbreviations unless they are well-known.
• Use synonyms to increase the probability of being found via different search terms.
• Repeat keywords.

Reference

Schilhan, L., Kaier, C., & Lackner, K. (2021). Increasing visibility and discoverability of scholarly publications with academic search engine optimization. Insights the UKSG journal (34), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.534

Social Media

An increase in using of social media for academic purposes, such as networking and collaboration or dissemination and sharing of information to much wider audiences, has been observed.

Engage and communicate

An online presence can be a personal calling card to highlight your experience and expertise, and brings about good chance to engage with your community and spark new ideas and collaborations. When you try doing this, avoid explicit self-promotion—allow your personal profile naturally develop based on your ability to be an effective and impactful communicator.

Instead of disseminating research in a unidirectional way, you can invite and engage others to foster participation and collaboration with research audiences.

You may consider disseminating research findings through visual elements (art or multimedia interpretations) to help your audience understand and interpret your research. Some examples include graphical abstract, infographic, science comics and video abstract.

Below are some examples of popular social media platforms.

Academic social media platforms

Social media platforms

References

• Argüello-Gutiérrez, C., & Moreno-López, R. (2024). Attitudes and practices of educational researchers towards the use of social media to disseminate science. Journal of Information Science, 01655515241245958. https://doi.org/10.1177/01655515241245958
• Ross-Hellauer, T., Tennant, J. P., Banelytė, V., Gorogh, E., Luzi, D., Kraker, P., Pisacane, L., Ruggieri, R., Sifacaki, E., & Vignoli, M. (2020). Ten simple rules for innovative dissemination of research. PLOS Computational Biology, 16(4), e1007704. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007704

Author Profiles

Using researcher identifiers when disseminating outputs will ensure that outputs will be unambiguously linked back to the individual researcher. For example, ORCiD provides a 16-digit digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher in the world. This helps avoid confusion (e.g., caused by similar names or name variants) and help you ensure you get credit for your work.

Common author profiles include Scopus Author ID, ResearcherID (Web of Science), Google Scholar Profile, and ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID).

For more details, check the guide at: https://libguides.lib.hku.hk/authorprofile

The HKU Scholars Hub aims to enhance the visibility of HKU authors and research. Eligiable HKU researcher will have a ResearcherPage, which is a unique author profile available at the institutional respository.

Reference

Ross-Hellauer, T., Tennant, J. P., Banelytė, V., Gorogh, E., Luzi, D., Kraker, P., Pisacane, L., Ruggieri, R., Sifacaki, E., & Vignoli, M. (2020). Ten simple rules for innovative dissemination of research. PLOS Computational Biology, 16(4), e1007704. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007704