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IOP Science

After publication of your article

Here we describe what we do, and what you can do, to promote and raise the visibility of your published article. We also outline the various options and procedures for making post-publication corrections.

Promoting your article after it is published

Introduction

You will be informed by email when your paper is published online. Publication should be the start of the next important phase in communicating your research: promoting your paper. The true value and impact of your paper can be greatly enhanced by promotion. The more people who read, cite and benefit from your research, the more valuable your paper becomes and the greater your esteem as an author. This is more important than ever given that the impact of research papers is increasingly being scrutinized by funders and institutions. As a learned-society publisher, we are committed to working closely with you to ensure that your article reaches as wide an audience as possible.

What we do to help increase the impact of your work

IOP Publishing undertakes a number of initiatives to promote papers and make them widely available. We:

  1. Publicize selected papers as part of (print and online) subject collections and annual journal highlights collections
  2. Highlight particularly interesting work using social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook)
  3. Give journalistic coverage to selected papers on our science news/community websites
  4. Press release particularly newsworthy papers
  5. Publish and promote authors’ video abstracts
  6. Display the number of downloads and citations each article receives, and also altmetrics such as number of tweets and blog entries, on the journal website (on IOPscience)

Although we try to promote as many articles as possible as widely as we can, you as the author are often the best placed to ensure your article is seen by the most relevant audience.

What you can do to promote your article

Remember to update any citations to your article on pre-print servers or in documents/presentations where you have referred to this work. The IOP Publishing citation style is:

[Author list] [Year] [Journal name] [Volume] [Article/Page number]

For example:

Cantillano C, Mukherjee S, Morales-Inostroza L, Real B, Cáceres-Aravena G, Hermann-Avigliano C, Thomson R R and Vicencio R A 2018 Observation of localized ground and excited orbitals in graphene photonic ribbons New J. Phys. 20 033028

Every author should have a network of colleagues and key people in their field who they would like to read their work. This is what we recommend that you do to help your paper to be found, read and cited by your peers:

  1. Email people you have referenced in your paper, and other key colleagues in your field, with a link to your paper
  2. Use social media to tell people about your work through blogging or through other outlets such as Twitter or Facebook
  3. Update your profile on professional and academic networking sites (such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Mendeley) with a link to your published article (please do not post the actual published article)
  4. Update your institutional/departmental homepage and research group website with a link to your paper
  5. Contact your institution’s press office with a summary of your paper and ask for advice about promoting it to the media
  6. Write a lay summary of your paper (with a link to the full version) and send to blogs in your subject area
  7. Produce a video abstract giving an accessible introduction to your article (this can help to encourage people to read your paper)
  8. Use a service like Kudos to help more people find and understand your work
  9. Mention your publication at conferences when giving presentations, and have copies to hand out to colleagues
  10. Check major abstracting and indexing services (e.g. Web of Science and Scopus) to make sure that your published paper is listed with correct details
  11. Upload your Accepted Manuscript (not the final published version for non-open access articles) to institutional or subject-based repositories, in line with institutional/funder requirements and the publisher embargo period (usually 12 months).

Post-publication corrections to journal articles

If you notice an error in your published article, several courses of action are available:

A corrigendum
should be published when you (the author) have made an error in your article
An erratum
should be published when we (IOP Publishing) have made an error in your article
A post-publication change to the original article
can only be made where the error affects the discoverability, visibility and citability of the article. For example, corrections can be made to author names, titles and abstracts, or changes to affiliations, footnotes and/or acknowledgments in order to meet the requirements of a funding body, or those related to legal issues. Please note, IOP Publishing has a specific policy relating to name changes, which includes instructions on how to make a request. Read the policy here.

In the case of a corrigendum or erratum, the PDF of the correction article will be attached to the online version of the original article, and a link created between the corrigendum/erratum article and the original article to make readers and other users/systems aware of the correction.

When submitting a corrigendum, the article title should be in the following format: “Corrigendum: “original article title” (“original article reference”)”

If a post-publication change is made, the online version of the article will be replaced and a dated note added to highlight the amendment that was made. Please note that in some cases it will not be possible to also correct any print versions.

Please contact us in the first instance and we can provide guidance on the most suitable course of action. Please note you may be required to provide reasonable proof that you are the author of the article. The majority of post publication changes require agreement from all co-authors to proceed.

In cases where serious errors are identified, we may publish a retraction or expression of concern:

A retraction
should be published as a way to correct the scientific record by bringing fundamental flaws/errors in a paper to the attention of the readership. They are usually reserved for cases where there is clear evidence the findings are unreliable due to misconduct or honest error. When articles are retracted they are not removed from IOPScience, instead they are retained with a clear notice of retraction and bibliographic databases are notified, as per COPE guidelines.
An expression of concern
should be issued when concerns about publications have not been conclusively proven but are sufficiently serious to warrant warning potential readers.
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