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How can I increase the scientific impact of my work?

Publish or perish

Science is a collective, collaborative enterprise, which means that researchers build on the results of other researchers (cf. "standing on the shoulders of giants", the slogan adopted by Google Scholar). That means that you would like any research you do to inform others, so that they may refer to it, use it, and hopefully develop and improve it. This will depend of course on the quality of your work: incorrect or vague ideas or unreliable data are unlikely to inspire anyone to make something good out of it.

However, it is not sufficient to produce good quality research, you must also ensure that others are informed about your results, i.e. you should "publish" it in the broadest sense of the term. This explains the "publish or perish" motto that characterizes most current research: an unpublished document could as well not exist since nobody but you can use it. And scientists who do not produce useable results, are considered to be non-existent within the academic community. Therefore, they are very unlikely to get or keep an academic position ("perish"), or collect additional funding. Publication has become the primary criterion by which research activitity is evaluated.

Still, publishing in the sense of making publically available is far from sufficient: we are presently drowned in an ocean of available information, and it is very difficult for any particular publication to stand out sufficiently so as to be guaranteed that it will be noticed by the people that matter, i.e. your "peers", or scientific colleagues working in the same domain as you. Before the advent of the net, publication was a slow, difficult and expensive process, and therefore only few documents would reach that stage. This provided some kind of indication that these documents were really worthwhile. Therefore being published, especially being published internationally, was already enough of a indication of quality or impact for a scientific work.

Peer review

Nowadays, with publication technologies becoming ever easier and cheaper to use, another "gold standard" of research quality has emerged: being peer-reviewed, i.e. having passed a strict selection procedure where anonymous experts in the domain have judged that your document is good enough to be published in the particular journal, book or website to which you have submitted it. However, with the proliferation of publication media, the standards of acceptability can vary widely from journal to journal, with some accepting more than 50% of all submissions, others less than 5%.

Journal impact factors

This created the need for some kind of "quality score for journals". The most used standard is the impact factor which measures how often on average papers in that journal have been referred to in other journals. This gives an indication of the "impact" of the journal on the scientific community, i.e. the visibility and authority that typicals papers in that journal have. As could be expected, more people submit papers to high impact journals and therefore by necessity their acceptance rate is much lower. This means they are more selective in the papers they publish, and therefore can be expected to offer higher quality on average.

The impact factor, which is computed each year by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for those journals which it tracks, has become about the most used indicator of the quality of a scientist's publications. Therefore, all researchers should be motivated to publish their work in journals with the highest impact factor possible. About the highest scoring journals overall are Nature and Science. Within the cognitive sciences, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, have the highest impact, so it is worth submitting a paper there. Impact factors for journals can be found in the Journal Citation Reports

However, the impact factor has a number of intrinsic shortcomings:

Personal citation scores

For these reason, in the long term it seems better to aim at high "personal citation scores" rather than high journal citation scores, i.e. make sure that your paper/book/document is referred to by many people, independently of the place where it has been published. For example, books are typically cited more often than papers, but don't have impact factors. Below, we'll discuss some methods to achieve that. For the short-term, though, for young researchers who cannot afford to wait several years before their works becomes widely known because they need to renew their funding, the best strategy is to submit first to high impact journals, and if this doesn't work, gradually go down in the "pecking order" until you find a journal willing to accept your paper.

Personal citation scores are also tracked by the ISI, in their Web of Science, including the Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. However, since the ISI database dates from long before the explosion in cheap computers and networks, they tend to keep minimal data: merely author's last name and initials, abbreviated title, journal name or abbreviation, and volume, issue and page number.

This makes it very difficult to find all your citations, especially if you have a common name shared with many other authors: you'll have to go one by one through the list of cited papers to eliminate all those written by someone with the same family name and initials, and keep track manually of all the times papers of yours have been cited. Also, the same name can sometimes be spelled differently, e.g. a paper by "Van Overwalle, Frank" can be listed under VANOVERWALLE F, VAN OVERWALLE F, VAN OVERWALLE F P or sometimes even OVERWALLE F V. It is worth checking all possible alternative spellings, or your citation rate can be strongly underestimated. Still, it may be worth to go through the exercise to convince potential sponsors of your research that your work is well-recognized internationally.

An advantage of this database is that it also includes citation of books or documents that were not published in one of the journals that ISI tracks, so you are not limited to traditional publication outlets to collect citation scores. However, the citations themselves come exclusively from tracked journals, and thus may underestimate non-traditional domains for which there are no established journals in the database.

PageRank: impact on the web

The newest generation of publication outlets makes fully use of the ease and computability of the web, providing "impact" scores that more flexibly reflect the true influence of your work on others. The most popular and probably most effective method is the PageRank algorithm that the Google search engine uses to calculate the importance of a web page. This algorithm does not calculate importance or impact only by the number of links (equivalent to citations or references), but by importance of the pages that link to you. Thus, importance is calculated recursively, and a document cited only once, but by a very well known other webpage may still get a high PageRank score, while a paper cited by many other papers that are themselves hardly referred to by others may have a quite low PageRank.

This alleviates the problem of the time it takes for novel work to become widely known: it can be sufficient to convince one respected authority in the field to link to you in order to immediately become much more visible (i.e. easy to find through the Google Search engine).

With the recent advent of Google Scholar, a search engine only for the scientific literature, Google seems to move towards an integation of (web-based) PageRanks, and (journal-based) citation scores, though it is not clear how the algorithm weighs the different contributions when finding the most "important" scientific paper on a given topic. An advantage of Google Scholar is that it is not limited to ISI-tracked journals as it also counts citations in working papers published only on the web. But it remains unclear which journal/papers are in Scholar's database, and which are not...

In the longer term, it seems likely that such recursive, web-based methods will become increasingly important, as more literature becomes available on the web, and the algorithms are further refined. Therefore, it seems like a pretty safe bet that having a high (Scholar) PageRank will be the most effective way to get your scientific work recognized. Moreover, you don't lose anything by focusing on increasing this web visibility, as people publishing papers in ISI journals also increasingly use the web to find relevant literature. Therefore they are more likely to cite a paper that is visible on the web, even if it was never published in a journal, or even underwent peer review. But is it not clear when funding authorities will start using web-based methods to directly evaluate the worth/impact of your research...

Improving your impact

As has become clear, there are two major methods to make your research more authoritative:
The first is the most traditional, but has the disadvantage that for novel, interdisciplinary research it will be difficuld to find a journal willing to accept a paper that does not fulfil its standard criteria of subject, methodology, reliability, etc. Still, improving the quality of your research and writing will definitely increase your chances of success.

For the second too, quality is primary, but here you have more leeway in getting recognition for unusual approaches. The most straighforward method is to look around in order to spot who is interested in similar approaches. You can then introduce your ideas to these peers, e.g. by:
None of these methods implies that you should broadcast your work as far and wide as possible ("spamming"). People are more likely to get irritated by "off-topic" announcements with little relevance to their work, and are more likely to ignore your announcements later, even if now they are relevant. The point is to be selective, and find the best academic environments, where your ideas have most chance to take root... For that, you'll need a keen eye for what's going in your field, and frequently investigate who is using similar keywords, or referrring to the same authors as you.

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