Register for ORCID to create a unique research ID. It links all of your research, funding applications and employment history (video 4:17), and distinguishes you from every other researcher, even if you have a very common name, or have changed names during your career.
WRaP is fully integrated with ORCID. This means that you can export records of research outputs directly from WRaP to ORCID and vice versa.
Making your research Open Access is a good way to make sure more people cite your research, but you can actively promote your work as well to maximise impact.
You can use academic networking sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu, which are similar in feel to LinkedIn or Facebook. You can connect to other researchers and upload open access versions of your work to these sites.
To help more people find and understand your work, upload it to Kudos and add a non-technical, layperson’s description. The University has a handy guide to writing well for the web which can help with this. Kudos then tracks where you have shared your work, for example on Twitter or LinkedIn, and how people have engaged with it, for example, clicking on it, downloading, or sharing with others. From this you can work out the most effective ways of sharing future work.
Build up a picture of your research impact by using bibliometrics or altmetrics. These measure the number of times a piece of work is cited by others and help show how influential it is. This information can be useful in demonstrating impact for the REF and research funding applications.
Bibliometrics include the number of times an article is cited, an individual’s citation count over time (the H-index), and journal impact factors.
You can use journal impact factors to work out where to publish, although there are widespread concerns about the usefulness of the JIF. We don’t have access to Journal Citation Reports which provide this information. SNIP and Scimago are useful comparable tools.
Altmetrics include social media mentions (likes, tweets, re-shares), mainstream media mentions, and interactions (downloads, clicks, views) (video 2:59). WRaP includes Altmetric badges (or ‘donuts’) as standard.
Download the Altmetric bookmarklet for free so that you can easily see the metrics of any article you are reading.
Bear in mind that high citation counts don’t always indicate high quality. Some articles are cited many times by others disagreeing with their findings. Bibliometrics should always be used alongside other quality measures.
Use the Metrics Toolkit to find out what different metrics mean, how they are calculated and whether they are useful to you. Lots of journal and database platforms will also have their own built-in metrics systems, like Web of Science JIF score.