Webinar on how to Improve Research Visibility and Impact

On Thursday, 8 July 2021, the Department of Library Services (DLS) at the University of Pretoria hosted a webinar on How to improve research visibility and impact.

The Deputy Director for Scholarly Communications, Digital Services and Systems, Mr Lazarus Matizirofa, gave an introductory welcome for the webinar. In his talk, he mentioned the role played by the DLS in promoting research visibility and impact, and highlighted major challenges in managing research impact. He encouraged researchers, including postgraduate students, to make use of specific research tools to expose their research outputs. Mr Matizirofa also invited researchers to partner with the DLS in enhancing their own research visibility and impact through these research tools. The research tools that the DLS supports researchers with are UPSpace (an institutional repository), the UP Research Data Repository (launched in 2020), ORCID, UP Journals (an Open Access publishing platform for UP journals launched in April 2021), Web of Science, Scopus, Scival (a tool used to evaluate institutional research performance). The DLS also created a researcher profile guide for students and researchers to improve their research visibility and impact.

The DLS invited a guest speaker, Dr Nader Ale Ebrahim, a research visibility and impact freelance consultant at the University of Alzahra, Tehran, Iran. As a researcher who has advanced knowledge and experience in technology management, he has written extensively in the following areas: bibliometrics, research tools, research impact and university ranking.

Dr Ebrahim gave a presentation and live demonstration showing new ways of disseminating research publications using proper “Research Tools”.

Key points included:

• the visibility of both research output and researchers to the general public and to other scientists;
• the encouragement of authors to collaborate when writing papers in order boost citations and other types of metrics;
• the selection of a research brand name as it distinguishes a researcher’ brand from other brands; and
• advising of researchers to adhere to publisher copyright and self-archiving policies, as well as to avoid disseminating research unethically.

In the second part of his presentation, Dr Ebrahim focused on research impact and whether UP research has made a significant difference. To improve research visibility and impact at UP, Dr Ebrahim suggested the following to authors:

• make their research publications available online;
• report on all projects;
• make unpublished papers available; and
• make use of repositories to upload their publications, theses and dissertations and presentations, but to avoid posting confidential publications. He also mentioned the general version of Figshare as a possibility to upload presentations.

The speaker looked further at the underlying motivation behind research visibility and impact, which is world university ranking and its methodologies that critically look at research output and research performance. Other strategies to increase citations that he mentioned were the use of tools that support the research and publication process, such as Web of Science, Scopus, ORCID, SSRN, Publons, Institutional author profile tools including social academic tools, such as ResearchGate and more. He also stressed the publishing of research outputs through Open Access (e.g. in Open Access journals), as well as the dissemination of research output through Institutional Repositories. In addition, he encouraged researchers to invest their time checking their online visibility and updating their profiles.

Two panellists were also invited to the webinar to share their perspective on the research visibility and impact.

Prof Tivani Mashamba-Thompson, the Deputy Dean of Research and Postgraduate Studies for the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria, outlined her faculty’s perspective on strategies that need to be put in place in order to improve the research visibility and impact of researchers in the faculty. She also touched on tools used by researchers in the faculty that can improve citation ratings (NRF rating), visibility and impact.

The second panellist Ms Heather Thuynsma, Lecturer in the Department of Political Sciences and Communications Manager in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria, shared information about the benefits of publishing in Open Access Journals, as well as on funder requirements.  What she considers critical for authors during this digital transformation with regards to their visibility and impact is the promotion of research outputs to a wider audience by creating an online presence through web and social media.

The webinar ended with a discussion, question and answer session. The guest speaker and panellists started the conversation by engaging, debating and answering questions around research impact, best measure of an article, quality of research, researchers not having enough time to upload their publications through these research tools, predatory journals, benefits of publishing in Open Access journals versus cost, institutional support, and ranking of the institution. The discussion revealed the following:

• Impact is not just traditional impact, such as the number of publications and number of citations. Other impact comes from other systems like Altmetric, PlumX, Impactstory. Each system is unique and does not cover all metrics, for example Altmetric collects impact from social media activities like Twitter. Google Scholar, on the other hand, always picks up the highest number of citations and provides an h-index. Different platforms offer different types of metrics depending on the publications that are available, i.e. the number of publications on Scopus may differ from the number of publications on Web of Science because these are two different publishers using different calculations and procedures. Unfortunately, publications on Scopus cannot be combined and analysed with publications on the Web of Science database.

• Researchers indicated that they do not have time to upload their research publications on these systems. Institutions differ, but the suggestion is that each faculty assign a dedicated person/assistant to assist researchers across departments with citations. Such a person could, for example, be a citation officer and should be familiar with repositories and how to upload publications. Another mentioned aspect  was that some researchers capture their publications manually, which could be time consuming. Also discussed was the use of reference management systems like Mendeley, Endnote, etc., to manage publications and the ease with which publications can be imported and exported into and from these systems.

• Collaboration and engagement with various stakeholders to address some of the research visibility issues was also stressed. The Library should take the responsibility to train researchers on how to easily promote their publications using these tools and how they can optimise their title, abstract, and keywords for search engines.

• Another issue that was discussed was the issue of predatory journals. Can articles published in predatory journals be made openly available through these research tools? The issue of some journals becoming predatory after a certain period, and the effect it will have for many researchers, was also discussed. It was further stressed that researchers should not try to promote articles from predatory journals through their researcher profiles. Authors should follow ethical procedures, and check if journals have a high impact factor and are listed in the accredited lists. Ms Thuynsma suggested that academic institutions should spend more time and debate around this issue. It was also stressed that research supervisors should create an awareness on these issues among postgraduate students. Libraries should also advocate for and create awareness of predatory journals and assist in conveying the message to students and researchers.

• It was also emphasized that publishing in open access journals has benefits for the researcher, but the high publication is discouraging researchers from publishing open access. The DLS offers and administers Open Access (OA) funds to subsidize Article Processing Charges (APC').

• During the discussion it was also mentioned that measuring research impact is not only achieved through measuring the number of publications and citations, but should rather be seen as a basket of metrics from systems. If there is discrepancy in social media metrics versus publication metrics then the Kardashian Index can be used. It measures the discrepancy between a scientist's social media profile and publication record.

In closing, Dr Johann van Wyk gave closing remarks, thanking the programme director, the deputy director, guest speaker, panellists, participants, and UP role players in the webinar.