How to enhance your visibility

Affiliation & keyword best practices

The Libraries has prepared the following resources on some affiliation and keyword best practices that can help make your research more visible:

• York affiliation best practices for your research
• United Nations Sustainable Development Goal keywords and your research  

Make it open access

• If you're not already publishing in an open access journal, see if you can archive a copy of the article. Our open access publishing toolkit has more about this.

Put it in YorkSpace

• If you can, put the article or book in YorkSpace, our institutional repository. Google and other search engines know that this is the institutional repository of a university and they put its holdings higher in their results. Your work is more likely to be found here than on a personal web site.
• Download counts are available from YorkSpace.

Use researcher profiles and author identifiers

The proliferation of scholarly publishing means that it is often difficult to identify what published work belongs to which author. This is even more challenging with common names and can affect the accuracy of author metrics. Authors can help this situation by setting up unique IDs. Some common IDs are:

• ORCID (Open Researcher Community ID): the most used platform-agnostic digital identifier that can help publishers and databases differentiate between authors with similar names. Signing up is quick and your ORCID can be linked to your ResearcherID and Scopus ID.
• ResearcherID: proprietary digital identifier developed by Thomson Reuters (Web of Science). After you sign up, you can link your ResearcherID to your ORCID.
• Scopus Author Identifier: proprietary digital identifier assigned to authors by Elsevier for Scopus. You can link your Scopus Author Identifier to your ORCID.

Relevant ORCID Primers:

• Primer - Managing your researcher identifiers (PDF)
• ORCID for researchers
• Add an additional email to your ORCID record (PDF)
• Primer - ORCID Identifier (PDF)

Understand Google Scholar

• Relevant Primer: Why Google Scholar? (PDF)
• Set up a researcher profile and keep it up to date.
• Words in article titles are weighted heavily.
• Google Scholar relies heavily on citation counts. The more an article has been cited, the higher it ranks.
• However, recent articles are weighted more than older ones. This helps counter the effect of citation counts.
• Words in bitmapped graphics (such as JPEGs and PNGs) are not indexed. Using vector graphics and plain text (e.g. for captions) means that Google Scholar will be able to read the words.
• Google Scholar does not seem to base its rankings on the frequency with which a search term appears in an article.
• Multiple versions of an article, for example on your home page and in YorkSpace, will be grouped together. Preprints, postprints and final journal copies are also grouped.
• More information about Google Scholar.

Announce it

• Update your personal web site, and ask co-authors to do the same. Add links to the article.
• Update your profiles at Google Scholar and elsewhere.
• Post about it on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.
• Talk to your faculty communications officer.
• York Media Relations is there to help: see their Media Guide.
• Contact a Knowledge Mobilization expert to learn more about the support available to you.