So far we’ve covered several ways to promote your work among your colleagues, but how can you better promote your work to the public?

The public is increasingly interested in the results of taxpayer-funded research, and the government agencies who fund you want to know your “broader impacts”. What can you do about it?  Getting your work in front of those who understand what you do can be difficult enough; how can you expect laypeople to see it and, more importantly, to “get it”?

Nowadays, there are a lot of platforms available that can help you promote your work. One of your options is Kudos. Kudos is a for-profit company built to help researchers explain their studies to both the public and others in their field. And yet, its customers aren’t authors but publishers.

Kudos’ customer list includes both toll-access and open access publishers, including eLife, Elsevier, the Royal Society of Chemistry. Publishers pay Kudos to get access to premium features for their authors. But anyone can sign up for free and use Kudos’ basic promotion and analytics tools to learn if others are reading and discussing their work online.

Today, we’ll help you check out Kudos as a tool for promoting your papers. Let’s dig in.

Sign up for an account

Head to growkudos.com and click the “Register” button in the upper right-hand corner. On the next screen, add as much professional information as possible, including your ORCID ID–this will help Kudos automatically find your articles in the next step. When you’ve entered all your information, click the green “Sign up” button, and then login to your email to confirm your account.

Claim your publications

Next, Kudos will list publications it believes to be yours. Add them to your profile by clicking the green button beside each title. If you make a mistake, you can always “unclaim” the paper by clicking the button again.

If any of your publications are missing, you can search for them by title or by adding a DOI.

Are all of your papers added? Great, let’s move on.

Explain your publications

Now, we get to the useful part of Kudos’ platform: explaining your articles.

All of the following steps will help those outside of your field better understand your research and why it’s important. This is an important but time-intensive part of the outreach process. So, you’ll likely just want to do the following for three or four of your papers that you need the most help promoting to the public.

Short title

Some paper titles can end up being long and jargon-filled. Adding a short title can help make your paper more discoverable by others in your field and beyond.

When writing your short title, try to strike a balance between phrases that your target audience will search for and phrases that are easy for your those outside of your core audience to understand. The LSE Impact Blog recommends “a full ‘narrative title’ that clearly summarizes the substance of what the article argues or what has been found out.”

So, this title (“Quindolinocryptotackieine: the elucidation of a novel indoloquinoline alkaloid structure through the use of computer-assisted structure elucidation and 2D NMR”) might end up looking more like this (“A computer-aided exploration of a new indoloquinoline alkaloid structure, quindolinocryptotackieine”) when shortened.

Lay summary

This is your chance to explain the study in detail, with public engagement in mind. Why does your research matter, and where does it fit in the bigger picture? Overall, try to avoid jargon, keep your sentences simple, and answer the question that’s inevitably in your readers’ heads: “What’s in it for me?”

More information on writing lay summaries can be found on the Digital Curation Centre and Asthma UK websites.

Impact statement

Kudos describes the Impact Statement section as “an explanation of what is most unique and/or timely about your work, and what difference it might make.” This is your chance to go into more detail about why your study was worth publishing about. How did it expand upon previous studies? What problems did it solve for the world? How might your readers’ lives be affected by the outcome?

Add links to supplemental materials and rich media

If you have figures, a video, or any other type of supplemental material, add links to each paper in this step. Creating these backlinks can help up your papers’ ranking in search results, and those supplemental materials can help your readers better understand your papers.

Share your papers

Next, you’re going to share your papers with your colleagues and the public.

On your publication page, click the green “Share now” button in the middle of the page. You’ll next be prompted to post your paper to Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere online using a special Kudos URL that includes a tracking code. The code will help you measure how often that link to your paper has been clicked on, which in turn will measure the effectiveness of Kudos’ outreach mechanisms.

If you want to share your paper to Twitter and Facebook, connect those services to Kudos. If you’d prefer to share it via email, on your shiny new blog, or elsewhere on the Web, choose the “Share Online” option and then select what kind of trackable URL you want to use.

Measure the success of your outreach

In addition to the trackable Kudos URL that you’ve now shared on the Web, you can discover the level of attention your work has received overall via Kudos’ integration with Altmetric.com.

Here’s how to access your metrics: on any page for your publications, click on the blue “Publication Metrics” button to see a table of your articles and the attention they’ve received online. There are two types of metrics you can see on this table: Kudos-specific metrics and Altmetric.com-powered metrics.

Kudos metrics

Kudos reports the number of share referrals, Kudos views, click throughs, and full-text downloads your paper has received. These metrics really only tell you about the success of promoting your paper on Kudos–they’re unable to tell you how often your paper has been shared using other links and DOIs.

Nonetheless, Kudos users do find these metrics useful–they helped this scientist see a definite bump in full-text downloads after he claimed one of his papers.

Altmetric.com metrics

These metrics can tell you about the attention your work has received on the Web overall–to a limited extent. Currently, Kudos lists the Altmetric.com score–a weighted sum of your news coverage, blog posts, Twitter mentions, and other online shares and mentions your work has received.

We’re not big fans of this score because the exact weights are not published, making it difficult to interpret. A better option is to click the “More Details” icon to the immediate right of  any of your papers’ titles to drill-down into what specific types of attention your article has received online. That said, the score can be used with caution to get a quick overview of which of your articles are getting more online attention than others. We’ll talk more later in the Impact Challenge about how to get more useful, in-depth, and transparent metrics of impact from Altmetric.com, Impactstory, and other sources.

Limitations

While Kudos makes it easy to claim papers, other features are more time consuming. The biggest drawback is the amount of time needed to write short titles, lay summaries, and impact statements for each of your articles.

There’s no way around it–you’ll have to put in some serious thought to write ‘em, and that translates to a lot of time. So, you’ll likely want to only write those titles, summaries, and impact statements for the papers you most want to have public exposure.

We also have reservations about the Kudos business model. It has pros and cons, for sure: it’s free to researchers (pro), but it’s primarily supported by publishers’ money, which means that researchers’ needs may not always be their top priority (con).

Another con is that in the Kudos model, promotion of publishers’ content becomes a responsibility of the authors, rather than publishers’ marketing teams. That said, your promotion efforts also help you, and Kudos provides a solid framework to guide you–a definite pro.

Homework

You may have noticed the number of big fat “X”s that I currently have on my Kudos Author Dashboard:

That’s Kudos’ way of telling me what promotion and outreach steps remain for my papers.

Your homework is to get at least three of your papers that you think might garner the most public interest onto Kudos, and to turn most of your “X”s into check marks. If you don’t yet have a Twitter or use your Facebook account professionally, that’s fine–just be sure to share your paper via email and blog about it. You’re also welcome to share a Kudos link to one or more of your papers in the comments below.

As for Twitter and using Facebook professionally–those are your two next challenges. See you back here tomorrow!

Updated 11/11/14: edited to explain how to find drill-down metrics for Altmetric.com score.