Leveraging your research online

Gareth Forbes

Curtin University and Engineers Australia

Step 1: Quality

• Do, and write up good work

• There is no substitute for quality!!!

• You are not a “used car salesman”

• You want to market your quality work in the best way possible

Step 2: Importance of the Title

• Often the last thing you write in a hurry

• It is the most critical deciding factor whether someone reads your work or NOT

• Think about how you decide which papers you read and which you don’t

Step 2: Importance of title

Conventional methods

1. Attend conferences and talk to people about your research

2. Talk to others about your work 3. Send your paper to other authors have

worked in your field (people you may have cited)

Still very important!!

Less-conventional methods

1. Loading of paper to digital repository 2. Academic social networks (digital

repositories) 3. Comments on forums about your area of

work 4. Personal webpage/site

1. Digital repositories

• Curtin www.espace.library.curtin.edu.au • UWA www.library.uwa.edu.au/repository • ECU www.ro.ecu.edu.au • Murdoch

www.researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au

What can be uploaded

• Most journals (90%) allow post-prints to be made freely available

• Many conferences allow complete free access to papers loaded onto institutional repositories

• Unfortunately many conference organises do not allow any material online such as: ASME, Engineers Australia, IEEE

What is a post-print

Benefits of online access

• Ability to reach far larger audience than otherwise practical

2. Academic Social networks

• eg. www.researchgate.ne www.academia.edu

• Usefulness is not entirely clear • They do have profound effect on Google

searches • Bring more content to first page of Google

searches, more likely to be found and read

Increased search ranking

Increased search ranking

3. Forums

• There exists academic forums such as: www.imechanica.org

• Comments and links to work from these forums can often generate interested readers to your work

• Once again, only add comments and/or content if you genuinely believe you are adding value

Top tips

1. Do good work! 2. Send your work to authors who you

believe are interested in your work 3. Upload all work to digital repository 4. Use academic social network to link to

online work