Research Guides: Your Research Identity and Impact: Home

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Why research identity and impact matter

Today there are many ways that researchers can showcase their research - through publishing journal articles, editing or contributing to books, publishing a monograph, participating in a conference, and much more. A challenge that researchers often face after publishing is to show the impact of their work in their respective discipline, generally to obtain a position or as part of the promotion and tenure process.

There are a variety of ways to demonstrate the impact of your scholarly or creative work, regardless of your discipline. This guide will help you determine the best methods, resources, and tools to use to show the impact of your scholarship.

Research impact matters because it can help you to:

Obtain a new position, or earn tenure and promotion
Broaden your network and find future collaborators for research
Improve your chances for citations
Strengthen grant funding applications
Create a national and international reputation for your expertise and research

Taking steps to broaden the reach of your research can help to improve your scholarly reputation, raise the profile of your department and college/school, and increase the national reputation of your institution.

How do I increase my impact?

There are many things you can do to enhance the visibility of your research:

Avoid journals that are not well-indexed (searchable) in research databases
Use researcher identifiers to link publications to you unambiguously (i.e., ORCID)
Analyze who is citing your research and through which channels
Publish Open Access
Deposit your publications in OpenSIUC (SIU Carbondale's institutional repository)
Upload full text of your papers to your researcher profiles or your own website
Share an early version of your paper as pre-print (ArXiv, bioRxiv, SocRxiv, preprints.org, Cognet, RePEc, SSRN, PeerJ Preprints, etc.)
Share your data (FigShare, Dryad, OpenSIUC, etc.)

You don't have to take all of these steps, but try one or more of them with your next publication. It's okay to start small and then begin to grow how you promote your research. Ultimately, these suggestions will be the most helpful if you do what you feel comfortable with.