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How to promote your work

What we do

Once your article is published we want to help you promote it as widely as possible, so that it comes to the attention of your peers and colleagues in the microbiology community.

Every article is, of course, published on microbiologyresearch.org, and we disseminate the article metadata to a whole range of different services, from large general platforms like PubMed and Google Scholar, to specialist abstracting and indexing services like CINAHL, to library discovery tools like EBSCO Host. We have also signed up to newer services like ReadCube, which go beyond traditional abstracts into advanced search technologies. We do that to make it as easy as possible for people to discover your work, no matter the starting point of their research. For information about which services take each of our journals, please check the About pages:

In addition to traditional Table of Contents alerts, sent out weekly by each journal, our Editorial and Communications teams work together to promote as many articles as possible. We work through the Society’s channels, including press releases, Twitter, and other social media options, as well as Microbiology Today, the Society’s Microbe Post blog, and the monthly members’ newsletter, so as to reach the widest possible audience.

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What you can do

We love tweeting about your work, but it’s much more effective if you work with us on the message – so when you submit a revised article, why not provide a tweet or two that we can share with our Communications team? And if you have a Twitter account, make sure you tag @MicrobioSoc when you tweet about your article so that we can retweet it for you.

There are many other ways for you to promote your own work. Start by making sure that the bibliography on your institutional or other websites is up-to-date, including links to the full text of your article on microbiologyresearch.org. You could also speak to your organisation’s Communications team about putting out a press release of your own. And of course, there are social media forums beyond Twitter.

Open data and open methodologies play a part, too. Archived and linked permanently to and from the article, data and methods become part of the scientific record as well as a route for discovering articles.

For something with impact beyond the scientific community, we encourage you to try Kudos, a free service which lets researchers explain their work in simple language before they share it. The Kudos team say that sharing these plain language summaries can help boost readership by around 23%.

There is also ScienceOpen, a free search and discovery engine which lets scientists share, comment on and rate publications. As an author you can use ScienceOpen to add plain language summaries, thumbnail images, and keywords to your article before sharing it widely with other users.

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Top tips

Keep it simple

With millions of posts being shared across social media platforms every day, it’s best to keep your post simple. Convey your message in a concise way, using keywords that will grab readers and spark their interest. Try using interesting formats such as questions to engage a reader’s interest. Just don’t forget to include a hyperlinked DOI, taking the reader to the full text of your article!

Use hashtags

Hashtags emphasise your post’s relevance and help with outreach, and are a great indicator of what is topical or interesting: trending hashtags give an idea of what people are talking about. If your article is particularly timely or topical, find the appropriate hashtag and add that in. Our journal hashtags are:

Use mentions 

Mentions help to highlight your post to specific users. Maybe mention your institution, or a co-author? Always remember to tag @MicrobioSoc on Twitter and we will share your tweet with our community of scientists interested in microbes, their effects, and their practical uses.

Include images

A picture says a thousand words and will help your post to stand out. According to a study conducted by Twitter, tweets with images get 35% more retweets than those without images, and each of those retweets opens up a whole new audience viewing your post and potentially reading your research.

Get involved

Social media is a great way to connect with fellow scientists in your specific area of study, or a broader field of science. Get involved in discussions in the comments section; the more exposure you have, the more likely people are going to see what you’re posting. This is also a great way of increasing your network and meeting new scientists.

See the impact

Our journals have been integrated with Altmetric, allowing you to see the attention that your article has gathered online. The Altmetric donut uses different colours to help authors and readers quickly visualise the ways in which a research paper is being discussed. The different colours demonstrate the range of ‘attention sources’ with blue representing Twitter mentions, red a traditional news source, purple for a reference in a policy document etc. Clicking on the donut allows authors and readers to find out more details about each mention, including the source and where in the world it came from.

Finally, remember to support the scientific community. If you read an article that you find particularly interesting, do your part to promote that research group’s work too!

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Self-archiving

As part of our educational remit, we make all subscription articles free-to-read 12 months after publication*. We also endorse self-archiving, often known as Green Open Access, and you have a range of options for depositing your articles in a subject or institutional repository. Check out the Open Access page for more information about Green Open Access.


*From 2021, subscription articles will be free-to-read after 36 months.

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