Leveraging your
research online
Gareth Forbes
Curtin University and Engineers Australia

Step 1: Quality
• Do, and write up good work
• There is no substitute for quality!!!
• You are not a “used car salesman”
• You want to market your quality work in
the best way possible

Step 2: Importance of the Title
• Often the last thing you write in a hurry
• It is the most critical deciding factor
whether someone reads your work or NOT
• Think about how you decide which papers
you read and which you don’t

Step 2: Importance of title

Conventional methods
1. Attend conferences and talk to people
about your research
2. Talk to others about your work
3. Send your paper to other authors have
worked in your field (people you may have
cited)
Still very important!!

Less-conventional methods
1. Loading of paper to digital repository
2. Academic social networks (digital
repositories)
3. Comments on forums about your area of
work
4. Personal webpage/site

1. Digital repositories
• Curtin www.espace.library.curtin.edu.au
• UWA www.library.uwa.edu.au/repository
• ECU www.ro.ecu.edu.au
• Murdoch
www.researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au

What can be uploaded
• Most journals (90%) allow post-prints to be
made freely available
• Many conferences allow complete free
access to papers loaded onto institutional
repositories
• Unfortunately many conference organises
do not allow any material online such as:
ASME, Engineers Australia, IEEE

What is a post-print

Benefits of online access
• Ability to reach far larger audience than
otherwise practical

2. Academic Social networks
• eg. www.researchgate.ne
www.academia.edu
• Usefulness is not entirely clear
• They do have profound effect on Google
searches
• Bring more content to first page of Google
searches, more likely to be found and read

Increased search ranking

Increased search ranking

3. Forums
• There exists academic forums such as:
www.imechanica.org
• Comments and links to work from these
forums can often generate interested
readers to your work
• Once again, only add comments and/or
content if you genuinely believe you are
adding value

Top tips
1. Do good work!
2. Send your work to authors who you
believe are interested in your work
3. Upload all work to digital repository
4. Use academic social network to link to
online work