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.

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In the olden days, you had to do a lot of hard work, a lot of well thought-through research, in order to get a paper published, and that was it. In the not quite so olden days, just publishing your results was not enough: you also had to push your results to the general press. A press release might help and a few really exiting results might make it to the newspapers. Today, all you need is an idea and a well-written press release, not something as old-fashioned as a result.

Gebakken lucht

This appeared on the BBC News website today: ‘A sample taken from what are believed to be the only polar bear remains to have been found in Britain has defied DNA analysis, it has emerged’. Let me translate that for you: ‘no results were obtained, it emerged’. To be clear here, researchers in Ireland took the remains of an 18,000-year-old polar bear, tried to extract its DNA, and failed. Then they still got their results on the homepage of the BBC News website. This shows that, in order to become a famous scientist, you do not need to have great results, just great press releases. I would not want to talk down the intelligence of the researchers involved; quite to the contrary. You too, if you are smart, should think about your press release. Hmmm, ‘researchers with big lasers find nothing, it emerged’….I like the ring of that!