Sunday, November 24, 2013

Ideas for Authors to Get the Word Out

Wiley Blackwell and the American Anthropological Association have held a number of meetings informing editors on how to get articles to reach more people... here are some suggestions that you can implement on articles you have already written, or ones you will submit in the future:

1) The article title is important!  Use title words that will correlate with search terms.  For example, "Mediating Culture" would not be a great stand alone title for an article. Try to get key words in the title to facilitate people being able to search and find your article easier.  Be specific, and try to avoid colons.

2) Associated content.  Because the articles are distributed online, you can add additional content through the online portal.  For example, a video abstract, additional photos, etc.  Keep this in mind when you submit your paper.

3) Use social media like Facebook, Twitter, and websites like blogs and your faculty or student webpage, etc. to tell the wider public your article has been published.  Include a link to the article.  There are new impact factor metrics that can include social media as well as citations in other articles to measure the impact of your article.  These metrics are sometimes important to departments in tenure discussions. Recent uses of web tech includes a google hangout recorded and posted with an article, short interviews with authors, etc.  Other suggestions from Wiley is to create a Wikipedia page that links to your article and contact your university media relations office with a description of your work to raise awareness.

4) Virtual issues can be used to curate and publish online a thematic or other grouping of articles from a journal, or across journals, at the AAA/Wiley Blackwell site.  There is no deadline for creating these compilations, and they only require a few paragraphs of introduction.  If you are interested in doing this, contact the journal and pitch the idea.  It entails minimal labor (beyond sifting through many issues and selecting a list of articles) and those virtual issues end up bringing in a lot of traffic to a journal's site. 


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