Rachel Shekarin silico Plants ensures that our authors’ work reaches as wide and diverse an audience as possible. One of the ways we support this is by actively engaging with social media across a range of platforms.
isP promotes its articles by creating simple informative videos. These videos are posted on our Twitter page with the article title, author’s handles, keyword hashtags, and a link to the article.
YouTube
While Twitter is an effective way to connect with readers around the world, tweets have a short shelf-life. For this reason, article videos are now also posted on isP’s YouTube channel. The new channel further increases article visibility by making the videos available in the long-term. YouTube accepts metadata for each video, making it searchable by article title, authors, keywords, and DOI.
Botany One
isP also communicates your work by writing and submitting posts to the Botany One weblog. Produced by in silico Plant’s parent company, The Annals of Botany Company, its aim is to alert plant scientists around the world to interesting and topical news about plants drawn from a wide variety of sources that includes in silico Plants. According to founding editor Dr. Amy Marshall-Colon of the University of Illinois, “having an online presence is a great way to draw attention to and share your work. It also provides a virtual way to build connections, like we would normally do at meetings, but are unable to right now due to Coronavirus-related cancellations.”
Altmetrics
Authors can ascertain the reach and attention their paper receives beyond the academic sphere by its Altmetric Attention Score. This score is derived by tracking and collating mentions and shares of academic research papers across digital outlets such as social media (e.g. Twitter and YouTube), blogs (e.g. Botany One), public policy documents, post-publication peer-review forums and online reference managers. “Authors can use their article’s Altmetric details page to quantify the influence of their work. It’s also a great way to see who is talking about their research. Through this, they can identify potential new collaborators and respond to commentary about their work and actively engage with the conversation,” says Dr. Marshall-Colon.
Search engines
More and more, researchers and other readers search for articles online using a general search engine like Google, or the academic equivalent, Google Scholar. All of isP’s articles are indexed in Google Scholar. With 389 million records, it is currently the most comprehensive and widely used academic search engine (compared to other Academic search engines like Web of Science and Scopus).
What can I do as an author?
You can increase your article’s Google search ranking using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices that help make your article as visible as possible on search engines. Two new practices are particularly important to SEO.
- Traditionally, authors were trained not to “waste” keywords by using words that were already in the title. Now, authors should include 1-2 keywords in their title, 2-3 in the abstract, and 5-7 in keyword fields. Where possible, they should put essential findings and keywords in the first two sentences of their abstract – this is the section that will most likely display in search engine results. Abstracts are highly visible on Google Scholar.
- Build links back to your article to improve search engine visibility. Google ranks pages more highly when they are linked to by other relevant and authoritative sites. Botany One posts and YouTube videos provide additional links for you to use to boost your article.
Additional post-publication resources:
- SEO made simple https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/authors/promoting_your_article/seo
- An author’s guide to social media https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/authors/Promoting_your_article/social_media
