Practices for enhancing research visibility, citations and impact: review of literature
| Date | 29 November 2023 |
| Pages | 1280-1305 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2023-532 |
| Published date | 29 November 2023 |
| Author | Sabitri Majhi,Lili Sahu,Kabita Behera |
Practices for enhancing research
visibility, citations and impact:
review of literature
Introduction
Increased research visibility is desired for a variety of reasons by researchersand research
departments. It might be as straightforward as wishing to increase the academic influence of
their research articles by increasing viewsand citations. However, others mightwant to raise
their profile in order to attract more prospects for collaboration or even to emphasise the
influenceof their study on societyas a whole. Universities,businessesand governments all over
the worldhave taken notice of the possibilitiesof more open research.Whatever the objectiveor
goal, it is crucial toshare the research work on the appropriate platform for dissemination.
Institutional and subject repositories are excellent locations to make research outputs
publicly accessible. Researchers can share their research with the public through a variety of
alternative dissemination mechanisms, including Research Gate, Academia.edu and others.
One of the best effective techniques to boost a research paper’s visibility and number of
citations is through open-access (OA) publication, because it makes the study publicly
accessible from the very beginning. Researchers can boost their visibility, preserve their work
and make it available for use in the future by making all of their outputs publicly accessible.
Ogunleye (2019) made a study on “Some determinants of visibility boost for research
publications among early career educational researchers in southwest, Nigeria”. In this study,
he described that the early career of educational researchers in Southwest Nigeria looked into
some determinants (shared reference databases, research profiles, publishing in OA, self-
archiving, publication metadata, researcher profiles and social media platforms) for boosting
visibility of the publication. A structured questionnaire on factors determining publication
boost (r 50.81) was utilised to collect data, and multiple regression analysis and the
Pearson’s correlation approach were employed to evaluate the data. A significant positive
correlation between each of the following was discovered in the results: joint reference
databases (r 50.17), Publication metadata (r 50.23), result profiles (r 50.44), open-access
publishing (r 50.27), self-archiving (r 50.52), social media networks (r 50.43) and
accessibility of published work are all positively correlated with each other. The six variables
had a positive correlation with the publication visibility (R 50.60), and they were responsible
for 32.9% of the gains invisibility of early career researchers’publications. Norman (2012)
conducted a research on “Maximizing Journal Article Citation Online: Readers, Robots, and
Research Visibility”. Then he explained that online academic publications with peer review
provide numerous advantages for researchers. They can enhance an article’s popularity and
publicity, connect someone’s research to the relevant web of existing literature rapidly and
add other scholars’attention who will use it, increasing the likelihood of it being used. Also
provided five basic areas to make the literature more popular which are choosing a search
engine-friendly title, writing of abstracts and introductions, making the article easy to find,
using of media and links, dissemination of articles after publication and emphasised on
increasing a piece of content’s prospects of future downloads, citations and visibility.
Research methodology for review
The search procedure included two phases. Synonymous keywords were found and collated
in the first stage. The featured research papers written in English were considered for the
AJIM
75,6
1280
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 75 No. 6, 2023
pp. 1280-1305
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-11-2023-532
study. The only factor used to choose an item for the current evaluation process was its
possible relevance. Options for basic and advanced searches were adopted to retrieve the
documents. Every research paper with the keyword “research visibility”or similar terms like
“research impact,”“Citation,”“tools to enhance research impact”or “papers addressed to
enhance research visibility, citation and impact”in the title, keywords or abstract was
deemed relevant for the study. Around 135 papers were retrieved using the Web of Science
database, which was obtained in September 2022. Out of 40 papers, they were determined to
be pertinent for this study, as those papers present usage tools and techniques to enhance the
research impact, citation and visibility. Another 19 papers related to the topic were retrieved
from the literature review tool “Inciteful”during April 2023. Hence, a total of 59 papers were
reviewed.
The researcher had to gone through all the retrieved papers thoroughly to investigate real
facts. The papers taken for review were a variety of publications, including journal articles,
conference papers, book chapters and book reviews. However, journal papers covered more
than 90% of the literature consulted for this review.
Tips for enhancing research visibility, impact and citations
a. Self-archiving
Self-archiving is the process of depositing an electronic document for free online, so that
anybody can access it and that helps to improve accessibility, usage, impact and citation of
research work. Through institutional or other repositories, manuscripts must be made
accessible to the public, such as ArXiv (https://arxiv.org/), SSRN (https://www.ssrn.com/),
ZENODO, n.d (https://zenodo.org/) and Figshare, n.d. (https://figshare.com/), etc.
Supplementary files such as data, extra figures, presentations, tables and reports can be
made available too.
According to Ert€
urk and S
¸eng€
ul (2012) keeping the findings of scientific research on
scholars’individual webpages, business websites or institutional repository (IR) is a
technique referred to as self-archiving. Making someone’s academic work accessible on open-
access websites is known as self-archiving. Hence, sharing your research public through
open-access platforms boost citations and guarantee greater impact. Lupton (2013)
mentioned that benefit of self-archiving content is that it can be found by a larger
audience with a quick Google search. Self-archiving is frequently described as the “green
way”to OA; this method allows for the free public distribution of full-text articles. As a result,
researchers can provide readers with access to their scholarly articles by making them freely
accessible (Bradley, 2017). Researchers can use this to submit their paper’s pre- or post-print
version to self-archiving systems. Pre-prints are scientific papers that have not yet undergone
peer assessment, and the peer-reviewed, authorised version for publication is considered a
post-print; both can be self-archived.
Cerejo (2013) presented ways to make your paper more accessible. According to the author,
self-archiving boosts the research’s impact, affordability and accessibility. She said that scientists
are being urged by funding organisations to accept the idea of granting OA to published
publications for self-archiving. She has given many examples, which are mentioned below.
(1)According to a guideline that Research Councils UK (RCUK) has stated, all scientific
articles that have been funded by grant organisations associated with RCUK shall be
made publicly available within six months of publication as of April 2013.
(2)All papers funded by public organisations like the US National Institutes of Health
are required to be stored in PubMed for free access after being accepted for
publication.
Review of
literature
1281
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