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IOP Science

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).