2022 Research Impact Challenge

Welcome to Day 2 of the 2022 Research Impact Challenge!

Your challenge today is to Increase the Visibility of Your Work. Making your work visible can help you increase the impact of your research by reaching a broader audience.

Select your challenge level today based on your familiarity with increasing the visibility of your work via social media, platforms outside of academia, and SEO strategies. Click on your challenge level using the buttons below to be taken to your challenge. Once you finish, scroll to the bottom of the page to enter the raffle.

To qualify for the raffle*, choose at least one challenge - entry level, advanced, or expert.

Entry: Promote on Social Media Advanced: Share Outside of Academia Expert: Use SEO to Get Your Article Noticed

* Five lucky participants will receive Lane Medical Library swag bags and promotion of their research by Lane Medical Library 

Today's entry challenge is to promote your research and engage with your global professional community via Twitter. While there are a variety of social media platforms you can use to promote your work, Twitter is one of the platforms that's counted in the Altmetric attention score which you'll learn about later this week. Read the interview with Associate Professor Dr. Gisondi (linked below) to learn how he uses twitter professionally. 

Create a Twitter Account:

1. Visit Twitter.com 

2. Choose your username and upload a photo that represents you and builds your professional brand.

3. Next, add your interests by typing in keywords into the search box.

4. Search for peers in your field who you would like to follow.

Post about your research using the following best practices:

1. Write a description using plain language to keep communication clear.

2. Share a link to the Article in the post. This is an essential step if you want to track the altmetrics of your article.

3. Include a domain-specific hashtag (ex: #medtwitter, #phdchat).

4. Use graphics to boost engagement.

5. Respond to commenters.

6. Tag your Research Group.

Share Findings via Alternative Platforms

Today's advanced challenge is to consider sharing your work via alternative platforms. For example, blogging, podcasting, creating videos, participating in outreach, and participating in interviews are all methods of disseminating your research outside of the traditional academic sphere. 

Don't know where to start? Read the interview (linked below) with PhD Candidate, Grossi-Soyster to learn more about blogging and participating in science outreach. Also, take a look at the bloggers who cover your field of research. You can use the altmetrics feature in Dimensions (linked below) to quickly find these bloggers using the following steps:

1. Navigate to the Dimensions database using the below link.
2. Search for the title of a prominent research article in your field. 
3. Click on the "Altmetric" button below the title. 
4. Navigate to the "blogs" tab to see who has blogged about this article. You can also take a look at Reddit threads, News outlets, Wikipedia entries, and more using the other tabs. 
5. Consider if any of these bloggers might be interested in learning about your work.

Lane Medical Library is not the only resource on campus that can help you with increasing the visibility of your work. Take a look at the Stanford Medicine Office of Communications website for more guidelines on promoting your work.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of attempting to improve the accessibility and discovery of a web page. For journal articles, this includes optimizing retrieval in academic search engines and databases, too. 

3 Tips Get Your Next Article Noticed

Your expert challenge today is to brainstorm how you plan to apply the following SEO tips to your next publication: 

1. Consider publishing in a journal indexed by PubMed/MEDLINE.

   • This will ensure your article will be tagged with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) that will increase your discoverability. 
   • Check out the "Journals Currently Indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE" link below to find a comprehensive list.

2. Repeat relevant words or phrases in both the title and abstract of your paper. 

   • Weave in the words or phrases multiple times in the abstract if possible.These should be terms you believe researchers will type into a search engine.

3. Use MeSH to select keywords to tag your article.

   • MeSH stands for medical subject headings. This is the vocabulary that is used to index articles in PubMed.
   • Using words and phrases that appear in MeSH may help your article move up the relevancy sort order in PubMed.
   • Use the MeSH On Demand Tool, or visit the MeSH thesaurus (both linked below) to identify MeSH terms to use as keywords for your article. 

Let Us Know You've Completed Today's Challenge