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Maximize the Impact of Your Work
The availability of altmetrics and article-level metrics depends on your work being available online. Work that is openly available online (i.e. not behind a paywall) will be accessible to more people and will therefore have greater impact.
Why not make all of your scholarly output available?
- You can post datasets on figshare or Dryad. (See our Data Management guide for more information on managing your research data.)
- If you create computer code, make it available through github.
- You can share presentation slides on SlideShare or figshare (which also accepts posters).
- For articles, make sure you comply with the URI Open Access Policy and deposit your work in DigitalCommons@URI.
- You can create a faculty profile page using SelectedWorks.
- Finally, an ORCID ID will help identify you and your work online.
- DigitalCommons@URIDeposit your work in URI's institutional repository to make it available open access. Open access scholarship is more likely to be used, mentioned, and cited because it is available to everyone.
- Selected WorksSet up a Selected Works profile page to list your scholarly products. Selected Works is similar to ResearchGate or Academia.edu except it has URI branding and is a non-commercial service offered by the URI Libraries.
- ORCIDRegister for an ORCID identifier. This is a unique author ID that distinguishes your work online from that of researchers with the same or similar names. ORCID helps altmetrics tools collect data on the use of your research.
Demonstrate the Impact of Your Work
The tools presented in this guide empower you to tell your own story of the impact of your scholarship.
Scholars should heed the advice of DORA and stop relying on the Journal Impact Factor to measure the impact of their research, and they should push back against colleagues, administrators, and funders who still do so.
For those exploring new ways of demonstrating their research impact, Jason Priem, co-founder of ImpactStory, offers this advice:
"First, try new things: publish new kinds of products, share them in new places and brag about them using new metrics... Second, take risks... publishing more papers may be safe, but scholars who establish early leadership in Web-native production will be ahead of the curve as these genres become dominant. Finally, resist the urge to cling to the trappings of scientific excellence rather than excellence itself. 'Publication' is just one mode of making public and one way of validating scholarly excellence. It is time to embrace the Web's power to disseminate and filter scholarship more broadly and meaningfully. Welcome to the next era of scholarly communication."
About this guide...
This guide was created by Andrée Rathemacher, Julia Lovett, and Amanda Izenstark, 3/2014.
Updated 2/2014, 4/2015, and 1/2018.