Research Impact Resources and Services

When considering research or scholarly impact, the choices you make throughout the research, scholarly, and creative lifecycle play a crucial role in the visibility and reach of your work. For example, publishing open access or ensuring your work has a DOI or persistent URL can directly influence its visibility and citation potential over time. Syracuse University Libraries takes a holistic approach to research impact services, keeping these factors in mind.

The following steps will help you maximize the visibility, reach, and impact of your works: 

1. Define your Goals (This should take place prior to doing research and publishing):
   • Write down your research, scholarly, and creative goals
   • Think about how your personal/professional goals align with societal, career goals, and University goals. 
2. Publisher Questions (This should take place prior to selecting a book publisher or journal):
   • Investigate the publisher and/or journal to see where that publisher/publication is indexed, and whether or not the article will be assigned a DOI, persistant URL, or other online identifier, which is an important component of being able to find and and track the citations your publications may receive. 
   • Check with the publisher to see what copyright, re-use, and sharing rights you retain as an author.
   • Have you considered submitting a preprint to a repository, which can help with the visibility and reach of your publication? Does your publisher allow you to deposit a preprint? 
   • Check to see what open access options are available through the publisher. Open access can greatly improve the visibility and reach of your publication and is sometimes mandated by funders. 
3. Submission/Revision:
   • While you're going through the revise and resubmit process, consider depositing your preprint into a subject appropriate preprint repository. 
4. Publish:
   • Talk to your subject librarian, our SURFACE team, or our copyright team if you have questions about author rights or open access, prior to signing the final publisher agreement.
5. After Publishing:
   • Identify an appropriate repository to deposit your postprint/final author manuscript, data, survey, code, supplemental materials, etc. Check with the SURFACE Team (Syracuse University's Institutional Repository) or your subject librarian if you need assistance selecting a repository or understanding whether or not you're allowed to make your postprint available publicly.  
   • If you received funding for your published research, scholarship, or creative work, check to see if there are any funder mandates related to sharing an open access version of your publication, data, or other supplementary materials.
6. Disseminate your works. (This takes place after depositing your works in an appropriate subject repository):
   • Update your research/scholarly profiles (Google Scholar Profiles, ORCID, etc.).
   • Present at conferences or professional events on your published works.
   • Share your works via social media or other professional networking venues.
7. Impact:
   • Track citations and other counts (metrics), that show the reach and impact of your works.
   • Contact your subject librarian or the Research Impact Team for guidance on how to capture and tell the story of your impact.
   • Tools that may be helpful for tracking metrics include: