LibGuides: Research Impact: Increase Your Impact

Claim Your Identity

Using an author ID will help distinguish you from other authors with similar names and will ensure that all your research output is grouped together - both good steps in broadening your impact.

Publish in an Open Access Journal

Publishing in an Open Access (OA) journal can increase visibility. A 2014 study found that full-text downloads of OA papers were 89% higher, and unique visitors were 23% higher than subscription access articles. SPARC (Scholarly Publishing And Academic Resource Coalition) Europe provides an up-to-date list of citation students and summaries of results.

There are many high impact open access journals to choose from, including PLOS Biology, Nature Communications, and BMC Medicine. You can speak with a librarian if you're unsure of open access journals in your discipline.

The University Library offers an Open Access Author Fund for Cal State LA faculty (along with students and staff) to publish in Open Access journals.

Deposit Your Research in a Repository

Publishing your research (papers, data, video, pre-prints, codes) in a repository can also increase visibility. A few subject repositories are listed below and you can also visit OpenDOAR, a directory of open-access repositories, to find others.

arXiv.org
arXiv includes electronic pre-prints from the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, statistics, economics, and more.
CiteSeerX
accepts materials for Computer and Information Science and is maintained by College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University.
PhilPapers
accepts materials for Philosophy and is maintained by the Center for Digital Philosophy at University of Western Ontario.
PubMed Central Repository
is a repository for US federally funded research outputs in Medicine. It is required for all publications supported by NIH (and some other US federal agencies) funding to be deposited in PubMedCentral.
Research Papers in Economics
is a collaborative effort of volunteers in 86 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics and related sciences. It is a bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components.
ScholarWorks
ScholarWorks is an open access institutional repository that collects, preserves, and provides online access to the scholarly output of the Cal State LA community. It includes, but is not limited to: Theses and dissertations, journal articles, books and book chapters, datasets, presentations, conference proceedings, projects, and Open Educational Resources (OER).
Social Science Research Network
aims at early dissemination of social science, business, law and economics research. It allows for deposit of both abstract of working papers and upcoming publications as well as full text of published outputs.

Research Networks

There are many networks you can participate in to find collaborators and share you work. Other discipline-specific online communities also exist.

Academia.edu
Network for researchers to share research and discover research being done by others.
LinkedIn
Social networking tool for professionals in all fields. A LinkedIn profile is similar to an online CV. You can search LinkedIn for people in particular fields of work or with a particular affiliation.
Mendeley
Known also as a citation management tool, Mendeley includes a social networking element. Researchers can create profiles and build and share their libraries of citations. Mendeley tracks how often citations are saved to libraries as a type of altmetric.
ResearchGate
Social network for scientists enabling sharing of research, collaboration, and some altmetrics. It also has active Q*A forums where you can get help and advice.
figshare
View, discuss, and share slides, posters, images, and presentations.