Now that the paper is published, then what? How can you get more people to read your published paper?
Dr. Charles Kalinzi, PhD, University of Portsmouth, UK & Associate Prof. Godfrey Mugurusi, PhD, Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Preparing, deciding, and submitting a manuscript to a journal are the first important steps that in the publication journey, but even after successful publication, promoting your work remains a challenge. This blog post proposes key ideas and strategies to ensure one’s manuscript is promoted with the intention of reaching a wider audience and having a significant impact on scientific and academic community. Now that your paper is published, the challenge begins ensuring that it is read and cited. Promotion is essential to broaden your paper’s reach. But why is it important to promote a paper, and what are the potential benefits?
The potential benefits
Some of the associated benefits include reaching a much wider society, an incremental growth of science, raising one’s academic profile and career advancement, opening up opportunities for collaboration especially with researchers in the sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Additionally, this increases visibility of the institution where one works, which may lead up to additional funding and future project opportunities. In order to achieve these benefits, it’s important to address some key questions and use some of the following strategies proposed below for one to get as much a wider circulation for their research as possible.
The proposed strategies, translated into questions
- Have a clear focus by asking leading and provoking questions; for instance… what is one promoting, and what makes the paper unique and worth sharing? Is it multi-disciplinary, is it
methodologically innovative and replicable? or does it present noteworthy results? What is the core message of the paper and how you can communicate it clearly to the target audience? Besides whom and where are the target audience? Are they on social media, in academic forums, or are they part of a specific professional network? By identifying them it helps to promote it much better to the paper’s intended target audience.
- Consider the power of using a relevant story. This goes to the fundamental question of why you needed to do the research and what motivated you to do this research? What did you find intriguing or surprising in the study? Telling the story that you are promoting can make it more relatable and engaging. So, use the story telling approach to communicate your message clearly and memorably.
- Maximise the power of visualisation in a research paper. The use of visual abstracts and pictures, charts, and diagrams can make the story more enticing for the readers. For presentations or posters, visuals help highlight your best results in a more appealing way. Of course, you can also use other forms of audio-visual approaches like short videos or audio recordings for the message to become more appealing to the younger and broader audiences. This would however be useful if data points are smaller to be captured onto a simple poster. If your data is complex, the use of infographics to summarise the entire story is much better. Tools like Mind the graph (https://mindthegraph.com), Canva (www.canva.com), and other online visual graphical platforms can help you create professional visuals.
- Use of social media and other online channels can help you amplify your research engagement. Social media is currently a powerful tool being used by many researchers to air out their achievements and are being used as a powerful tool to showcase latest research across a variety of disciplines. You can share your work on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Mendeley, ResearchGate, Reddit, Bluesky, among others. These platforms, which are widely known, can ideally help you to track the comments and feedback to hear what readers are interested in and what others are saying about your ideas and how best these ideas can be further spread and improved for a wider coverage. Eventually you can use tools like Altmetrics (or alternative metrics e.g see https://www.altmetric.com) to track and monitor the online attention the research outputs receive and especially how your paper is being cited. This tends to compliment the traditional citation-based metrics.
- Promote and disseminate ideas. Use blogs, using short stories, or a short policy brief, depending on the audience you are targeting. Other avenues academic researchers have
resorted to especially after the impact of COVID 19 include using Youtube videos, sharing through popular online interactions like “webinars”, “tea-time sessions”, “chat with a star”, the “logistics of logistics”, which are very appealing. Through these activities, you disseminate your work, and get responses and comments about what you are working on and how you can continuously improve your work.
6. Use Preprints. Key examples of pre-print repositories include arXiv (www.arxiv.org), bioRxiv for biology (www.biorxiv.org), medRxiv, and ChemRxiv, which specialize in physics/mathematics/computer science, biology, health sciences, and chemistry, respectively. Other options include Research Square, OSF Preprints (https://osf.io/preprints), and SSRN (https://www.ssrn.com/index.cfm/en/the-lancet/). Interestingly, often young researchers fear sharing their unpublished work, but using preprints offers a chance to improve the quality of the paper.
Finally take note that registering, subscribing, and belonging to professional academic community is key especially for broadening professional visibility. Belonging to a research group or association whether regional, territorial or covering a wider audience is one way of gathering recognition and international presence of network of experts and all sorts of people that can connect you to potential research projects to expand your research publishing experiences. Other areas that are most direct to publishing and sharing work to a wider audience is looking for conferences (refer to an earlier published blog post on accessing travel grants and awards) and getting useful comments to further improve manuscripts for further publications.
Thumbnail image: Created by Charles Kalinzi using Copilot and ChatGPT, with educational guidance, August 2025.
1st image: Hartono Creative Studio on Unsplash
2nd image: Chris Alfeus on Unsplash