Prepare your article – and your audience

If you follow these simple tips before your article is even published, promotion will be a breeze. Not only will your article be easy to find and connect with, but you’ll have an audience of eager advocates just waiting to help you spread the word.

Tip 1: Remove all doubt or confusion

Prepare for the fact that many researchers still discover articles through search engines or journal contents pages and optimise your title and abstract. Before your article is published, think about how these things could help steer readers toward your work.

Your title should leave no room for doubt about the subject of your article.

Bad examples:

• Superamphiphobic coatings prepared by the combination of palygorskite and organosilanes
• Fabrication of superamphiphobic coatings under PAL, 1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorodecyltriethoxysilane and tetraethoxysilane
• Novel superamphiphobic coatings

Good example:

• Durable and self-healing superamphiphobic coatings repellent event to hot liquids

Your abstract should follow the same rules and:

• be written in plain English that’s easy to understand and clearly conveys the importance of your work in just a few words
• set out the objectives of the work
• summarise the key findings
• emphasise (without overstating) the significance and potential impact of the research

Because webpages often only display abstracts and then link to the full text, your abstract can be the deciding factor in whether or not a reader decides to click through to your article.

Bonus tip:

Think about the keywords you’d use to search for your article and include them in your article’s title and abstract. The more you use those exact words, the better your chances of rising through the ranks and appearing at the top of search results.

Tip 2: Get creative

While you’re writing up your research or waiting for it to be published, think about how you could grab your readers’ attention with a visual hook that draws them into reading your words.

Design a graphical abstract

This should be a simple representation of what the reader can expect when they click through to your article.

Produce a video abstract

Offer a quick insight into the focus of your research with a video abstract. With all major social media platforms now incorporating video options, it’s a great tool to engage more people with your research and also a really easy way for them to share your work with others.

This kind of art fills two functions: it can convince a reader to take a closer look and double as an eye-catching social media post.

Tip 3: Network smarter

It’s never too early to start developing a network of valuable contacts, like-minded colleagues and allies in related fields.

As soon as you’re ready to publish your research, these are the people who will be eagerly waiting to read it – without any extra effort on your part. And, if you follow our tips below, they might even be excited enough to introduce your work to their own audience, who could then go on to share it with more people, and so on...

In person

If you’re at a conference or event, have a business card ready and a quick introduction prepared about who you are and what you do. But remember: you’re building relationships at this point, so be sure to ask other people about themselves. They may be working on something you’re interested in and when the time comes you can help each other get the word out.

Online

Have you joined any academic social networking sites, like Mendeley, ResearchGate or Academia? These online forums are great places to find like-minded scientists. Start by participating in discussions around your research topic and commenting on other people’s work. After a while, this will probably lead to conversations about your work and then you’ll get the opportunity to share your research without any awkwardness.

Tip 4: Keep it simple

With a multitude of new research being published every day, it’s hard to pick out the really important stuff. So make it easy for your audience. Draft a brief summary of your research that can be quickly and easily understood. In fact, write two! One for people in your field and one for everyone else.

Having a ready-to-go summary that uses plain English to explain complex ideas and technical terms will help you connect with researchers in allied fields, members of the media and even policy makers. And preparing two simple summaries means you’ll never have to scramble to describe your research in an engaging and concise way – no matter who you’re speaking to.

Where it’s useful to have a simple summary at the ready:

• at conferences or networking events
• in press releases
• during oral presentations
• anywhere a lay summary is required, like Kudos or ScholarOne.

Tip 5: Get early citations

The longer your work is online and visible, the more chance it has to attract attention, generate excitement and gain citations.

By submitting your un-reviewed manuscript to a preprint server like ChemRxiv, you can start circulating your research before publication. And, because preprints receive DOIs during the ChemRxiv posting process, they are fully citable and part of the scientific record. In fact, you can start getting citations 30 seconds after posting.

At the Royal Society of Chemistry, we support our community of chemical scientists in sharing new research findings before and after publication in our journals. That’s why we encourage preprints, but other publishers may have different pre-publication policies.

Tip 6: Publish with the best

When you’re ready to publish your work, you want to make sure it gets seen by the world’s top scientists.

Publishing with the Royal Society of Chemistry means automatic access to a global audience. Our journals are read and cited by individuals in 140 different countries, with 48 of the world’s 50 top rated institutions for chemistry having access to everything in our current journal portfolio.

You could reach an even wider audience if our editors pick your article to highlight in Chemistry World or to the global scientific media.