An increasing number of geographers are now using the internet to share and publish their work with and for a broad audience. Doing so not only helps to promote your work, but, more importantly, makes it available to people around the world that might not otherwise have access to it. There are three interlocking ways in which you might want to consider sharing your work online.
Enhance your profile
Ensure that you have a professional and publicly available profile page. At a minimum, the page should contain a description of your research interests, a list of your publications, links to any courses that you teach, and an email address or phone number. Most universities encourage (and provide support for) students and staff to develop an online presence. However, many of these profile pages tend to be woefully out of date. It is important that your web presence accurately reflects your current interests and outputs (rather than work you were doing three years ago), and it is fairly straightforward to create a quick and easy to update website using free tools.
Keep blogging
Blogging is a useful way of sharing ideas and having conversations outside of academic journals and conferences. Because of this, the potential audience for blogs (even blogs about niche topics) is enormous compared to audiences for most traditional academic outlets. Many academics therefore choose to use blogs as a platform for translating their research into more accessible language and ways of writing (see Thinking strategically about publishing). Doing so allows for a communication of ideas between researchers and journalists, policymakers, and members of the public that might not otherwise have been possible.
Furthermore, I’ve noticed with my own blogs (zerogeography.net and floatingsheep. org) that while the majority of views and comments come from the UK and the US, a significant number originate in the global South. Blogging can communicate ideas to audiences that might not have the resources to access your work through traditional channels.
Journal articles, book chapters and conference papers are necessarily only selective slices of a much larger universe of knowledge, thought and research that we devote effort to. We spend a lot of time reading, researching, analysing, mapping, writing, and reflecting; and blogs offer a way to make more of this work public. Nobody expects perfectly polished writing or thoughts in a blog post, but it remains the case that there will be audiences for much of what you have to say. Blogs are most useful when written as frequent and short updates about your topic of interest. They also seem to be especially popular when they contain visual cues. Photos, charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and other visualisations can offer an accessible entry-point (and can hyperlink) to some of your more detailed work and publications. This kind of visual communication can also help to share your work beyond English-speaking audiences.
Social networks
Social media can be a highly effective way of broadly sharing your work. Many in academia question the usefulness of such platforms. But Twitter and Facebook can be about much more than just celebrity gossip and funny cat videos. Twitter, in particular, is an efficient way of communicating ideas and links (posts are limited to 140 characters) and staying aware of work of others in your field. You can also take advantage of the social media tools being developed especially for academics, such as Academia.edu, Research Gate and Mendeley, which help you promote your publications directly.
Most of these methods of outreach can also be monitored to track online impact. Simple tools exist to measure where, when, and how many people are downloading, reading, and sharing your work. The Internet is littered with shells of abandoned blogs and websites, and I suspect that many of their owners failed to adequately reach out to the right audiences. (Alt-metrics are used by publishers too).
Google and other search engines will only do some of the work for you. In the same way that going to the right conferences and workshops can be useful for your professional development, tapping into the relevant social media circles is ultimately necessary if you want people interested in your topic to read your work. Whether you like it or not, people will search for you online and form impressions about you based on your digital traces. It therefore makes sense to be keenly aware of the ways in which your work and your profile are presented and to actively shape your online presence into a form that you are comfortable with.
- Create a short summary of your work, include your key findings and write it in a way that will be accessible for a wider audience.
- Publish a post about your article to your/departmental/research group blog. If you have published in a RGS-IBG journal, submit a post to Geography Directions.
- Tweet about your paper through your own account or through a Society or department account if possible.
- Contact your department’s press office to see if your article is relevant for any publicity opportunities – do this when the paper has been accepted for publication.
- Talk about your paper at a conference, with colleagues and personally raise awareness, include a link in your email signature.
- Create an account on an academic network (e.g. ResearchGate, Academia. edu, Mendeley), to highlight your work to thousands of fellow academics
- Use services such as Kudos to highlight the relevance of your work, share through email and social media, and measure downloads, citations and altmetrics.
About this guide
Publishing is a crucial, but sometimes daunting and unexplained, part of academic life. All academic geographers are supposed to do it, but there are few formal guidelines about how best it should be done. Many of us discover how to publish by trial and error or through the mentoring and support of colleagues. Publishing and academic landscapes also change, presenting new challenges to established academics. The publishing and getting read guides have four main aims: to provide clear, practical and constructive advice about how to publish research in a wide range of forms; to encourage you to think strategically about your publication profile and plans; to set out some of the opportunities and responsibilities you have as an author; and to support you in getting your published research read.