Research Impact

You may wish to create an account on some of the sites below as these often allow you to promote your research and potentially extend your impact and reach as a researcher.

 Academia.edu is a social networking website which has over 8 million registered users as of 2014 and over 2 million papers listed. Its mission is to 'accelerate the world's research'.  It was launched in 2008 and can be used to promote your research papers, share them and monitor their use.  You can also network on this site by finding and collaborating with other academics and researcher working in the same areas as you.

 ResearchGate is another social networking site.  It was initially founded for scientists (members were encouraged to share raw data and failed experiments, as well as successes) but now includes researchers working in all disciplines. It has just over two million members.

Blogs are useful to express your own opinions and to promote your research. You may wish to have your own blog- see . You can follow other researchers' blogs and see their new postings and some blogs are interactive and allow comments and discussion. Useful research blogs include: The Thesis Whisperer and PhD life.

Your University or institution might have its own blog platform which you could use or there are many free ones available such as WordPress and Blogger. 

Mendeley and Zotero are free bibliographic management tools which you can use  to create a library of references of articles, book chapters, books, reports and conference papers.

These sites also encourage sharing and collaboration and you can do this by joining various Special Interest Groups.

Sharing and actively promoting your research will lead to more people reading it and hopefully, more people citing it in their own papers. You can connect your research with people outside of academia, too, increasing its impact and connecting with more readers in industry, in the media, and around the world. See our guidance on How to Share and Promote your Research.