In the not so distant past, the guaranteed pathway to promotion and tenure at colleges and universities world-wide was to publish a long series of refereed journal articles. This is especially true for faculty who have primary responsibilities in the domain of teaching, where they often publish in the genre of SOTL—the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. In recent years, given that there are now many pathways to publications—including poorly understood or appreciated open access journals–that once clear pathway to success has become convoluted with questions about if your published paper has had an actual impact on the scholarly landscape. In other words, the question has now become, “yes, your work was published; but, was the paper any good?”
In a seemingly desperate search for a way to somehow objectively answer the question of “was the published paper of any use to the scholarly landscape?”, university administrators have devised all sorts of attempts to measure paper quality. These hotly debated assessment schemes include assessing each journal’s relative quality ranking, the number of pages printed, and mathematically mysterious and volatile h-, g-, m-, 10-, and eignenfactor impact indices, among others. In the end, what most scholars do seem to broadly agree upon is a consideration of how often a paper is cited or referenced in other papers–your citation rate.
As a result, if you want to increase your publication citation rates, there is a critical element that must be courted—other scholars need to know that your journal article exists! So how does one let other people know that you’ve published an article? Indeed, far gone are the old days of scholarly laboriously mailing out pre-print copies of their articles. Similarly gone are the days of scholars sitting in the library reading their favorite journals cover to cover. In fact, I’m not sure any of my recent graduate students have actually ever been in the library building—like myself, contemporary scholars read journal articles found via the Internet. Unquestionably, today is a new era in academic publishing and the entire scene is largely situated in the free-access Internet.
So, if you want scholars to know about your paper so that it can be cited, the most important way is to be sure that your scholarly work can be easily found on the Internet. Unquestionably, biggest source for finding academic papers is Google Scholar. If you don’t have one, you need a profile on Google Scholar—go to scholar.google.com and click on ‘my profile’ (or perhaps ‘my citations’) to set one up. Be sure that you have settings that “My profile is public” and for Google Scholar to automatically add articles to your profile. Don’t forget to “add co-authors” as this further enhances your visibility or ‘google-ability.’ When you have time, you can manually add articles to your profile if you need to, but Google almost always eventually finds most of your articles, abstracts, talks, proceedings, and posters.
One challenge regarding becoming a widely known, internationally recognized scholar is that you might have a common name; names like Wang, Smith, Muller, or Khan. The Internet’s solution is ORCID—the ‘Open Researcher and Contributor ID’ system. You need to go over to ORCID.org and register for an ORCID ID. If you like, ORCID can even generate a visual QR code that you can put on your papers, posters, and website. Although not critically important today, it will become more and more important as you progress in your career and the Internet becomes more and more intertwined in our lives.
The only major disadvantage to Google Scholar is that although it lists your papers, it doesn’t actually host them. In order to get your papers to be as easily accessible as possible, you should also make a profiles on both Academia.edu and ResearchGate, where you can actually upload PDFs of your publications, posters, and other creative products. Often, once you have papers in these two places, Google Scholar will learn to point directly to them, so scholars all over the world regardless if they have libraries, can read your papers.
You should only upload papers for which you have the rights to do so. Some traditional journals have extremely strict rules about where you can post your paper online—most of these journals make their monies by having pay walls or requiring expensive subscriptions. This is why so many scholars are now turning to open access journals where the authors pay a nominal fee to have their paper peer-reviewed, archived, and published with no cost to other scholars. Unquestionably, in my own work, my open access articles are cited many times more often than articles in fancy, expensive, top-tier journals that aren’t read by as many people because of their subscription costs.
Finally, although many scholars scoff at the idea, you should celebrate every time you get something published and shout it out on social media. You should get accounts on LinkedIn and Facebook at least and post announcements about what is going on with you professionally. Your institution might also have social media accounts that are always looking for something to post, and you should let those folks know too what you’ve done so they can celebrate it with you. And, remember that slowly accumulating stack of business cards gathering dust you’ve been collecting over the years every time you go to a conference? Now is the time to start an e-mail list of your acquaintances so that you can blast out copies of your papers to people you’ve met. If you want people to cite your work, they have to know that it is there, and it is your responsibility as a scholar to share your work with the world.
Tim Slater, University of Wyoming, Tim@CAPERteam.com
Suggested citation: Slater, T. F. (2019, February). How to increase your SOTL publication citation rates. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(7), https://www.scst.org/blog
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