Can I encourage a blog or comment about my publication?

Yes. This can be a very effective process, although it can be a little time consuming. There are two main ways to promote your work online in this way.

Comments:

• Your article will have a comments function online. This will enable readers to give opinions and feedback, and generally help to start a discussion within the academic community, which will help connect your work more broadly within your field. We therefore recommend that you ask your peers to read the article and then make comments online. You will then be able to post a reply to the comments to encourage further discourse. More comments will not only help to illuminate the impact of your article, but also make it more ‘findable’ for online search engines.
• If your article concerns a timely subject mater, consider visiting relevant news articles (nytimes.com, cnn.com, bbc.co.uk etc.). In the “comment” section at the end of the article, post a one-sentence comment highlighting the relevant research you just released and providing a link to the full text of the article. You may feel awkward posting such comments on news sites or blogs, but they will help draw additional attention to your article (including among journalists, who often review comments on their articles).

Blogs:

• Find relevant blogs and contact the bloggers to ask them to consider writing about your recent research and to discuss its potential implications. Ask if they would review your article on their site. Or, if you have a blog, or if your institution does, write a post summarizing your research and drawing out its implications in a concise manner. This could be a mere 150-500 words but should not repeat your abstract.

A list of additional suggested tasks for helping to increase the impact of a publication is available for download .