Ad Lagendijk
19 March 2010
How to publicize your paper?
Tags: interview, mailing list, press release, promotionPosted in Getting published, Tips
I suppose that your paper has been accepted for publication in a scientific journal. You successfully rebutted all the comments of the referees. Great.
But now, what do you do next? Just and wait and sit for you to become famous automatically? It depends on the quality of the paper. If this was just a middle-of-the-road paper spending time on its promotion seems a waste. But what if you are very proud and you are convinced this really is an important result? An interview on national tv would be great.
Target group
Whose attention would like to draw? Colleague scientists, science writers, or the public at large?
Editor is also eager
Nowadays journal editors also are eager to promote their best papers. So when you submit your paper, or after your paper is accepted, you are usually requested to summarize the importance of your paper in laymen terms. If the journal is part of a large publishing house they will have a website that highlights their best papers; some papers will be selected to feature in their rss-feed, and if they have a monthly glossy your paper might feature in there.
Press-release
Your affiliation might prepare press-releases for their best papers, if not for all their papers. Or you could just write the press release yourself.
Communication professionals
Many larger scientific organization employ communication professionals. You might want to work with them, or maybe you do not have a choice: you are forced to work with them.
What do you think is the best:
- write a press release and spread it
- write a (national) popular article about it and try to get it published
- personally contact journalists of international magazines and glossies
- personally contact national journalists (radio, tv, newspaper)
- send a reprint by regular mail to a number of colleagues
- send an email with pdf attachment to colleagues
- go to conferences and talk about it
- publish the same result over and over again
- or later: send an angry letter to any colleague that did not refer to your work in his paper
- or later: keep on self-citing it
- hire an external agency to do the promotion for you
- just wait and see
In the past I found nr. 5 the best for letting your scientific community know and nr 4. for trying to get some national attention.
Follow
19 Mar 2010 16:36, Jean-Luc Lebrun
If you consider your findings that important, then build on them and…
13) Write the next paper in a different journal…
14) Send a reprint to the people referenced in your paper, with some additional data and possibly a question… but make sure you did not mention that, in the paper you send, their work is mentioned as being limited, or lacking this or that, or suffering from… or fails to 🙂
21 Mar 2010 23:13, Ad Lagendijk
Jean-Luc, your second remark, 14, is indeed very good.
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I forgot to mention the fact that nowadays quite a number of sciencebloggers are around. You might try to convince them to pay attention to your new results.
23 Mar 2010 4:49, David Stern
What about holding a seminar/presentation/public lecture and inviting the media, government people etc? This is what we did today for example. As well as putting out a media release + blogging + sending the release to bloggers.
23 Mar 2010 5:41, Jean-Luc Lebrun
David, with “public” lecture comes “public” responsibilities. As soon as the media is involved, public misunderstanding is a possibility. The public lecture also requires the paper to be elevated at a level of generalities not compatible with the specificity of the results and outcomes.
food for thought…
23 Mar 2010 17:29, Zippo Lighters
The public can be mean at times but id just present it your way and be yourself.
24 Mar 2010 19:28, Mirjam
It really depends on what your goal is. As a humble postdoc I haven’t seen too much pay off so far from write-ups of my research in national newspapers, even though the attention is nice of course (usually this is initiated by a press release written by myself or the press office of the university). What I find much more worthwhile is 1) to present my work at national and international conferences and, even better, 2) to give colloquia at many universities and research institutes. In both cases you will find people that really want to know more and sometimes it even leads to interesting collaborations (and, of course, it may lead to more citations). I find this much more of a boost to my research than the praise of some vague friend or relative who spotted my research in the newspaper.