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Strategic publishing

Provides information on applying strategic measures when considering publishing, promoting and tracking your research.

Ways to promote, track and share your research

Promote your research

Use social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn to promote your publications and achievements, and to follow key people and organisations in your research field.  

Note: If you use social media for both personal and professional purposes, consider creating separate accounts for each purpose. 

For more information about using social media in academia, refer to the Social media for researchers guide.

Regularly updated blogs and websites can be an excellent source of news about either specific research areas or academia and research in general. Some examples of blogs you may find useful:

Track your research

Consider using altmetrics (alternative metrics) to track your research mentions on social media platforms and in other non-academic publications including news media, public policy documents or websites.

Use Altmetric Explorer to monitor online activity surrounding academic research and to get access to your research outputs that have received mentions by demographic, time period and source. 

For more information on using altmetrics refer to the Library's Altmetrics guide.

Share your research

Sharing your research by making your research data discoverable increases your research impact, assists with the verification of results, and more importantly allows others to reuse the data in new ways creating new research endeavours. Some research funding bodies such as the Australian Research Council (ARC) mandate that research data is available via open access.

For more information on managing your research data refer to the Library's Research data management guide.

Media engagement and translation

Other ways to promote your research may involve media releases or translation of your work. You may want to consider:

  • releasing a news story via RMIT Communications
  • becoming a media expert in your research area
  • undertaking training to engage with the media effectively
  • contacting the RMIT Partnership and Translation team to discuss how your research can be implemented into practice and/or policy.

For more information refer to the resources below:

Researcher networks

Consider joining researcher networks appropriate for your discipline:

Digital object identifiers and persistent identifiers

What is a DOI?

A DOI (digital object identifier) is a persistent identifier (PID).  PIDs are long lasting digital references to objects, people or organisations. For example, ORCiD and other researcher IDs are persistent identifiers for people.

In the context of research visibility, persistent identifiers like DOIs are provided by services that allow you to update the location of a research output so that the identifier consistently points to the current online location, or to an online record describing the item.

Why use a DOI?

While information such as a URL might provide a unique reference to a digital object, it is not necessarily persistent. If the object is removed from a website, or its location or online address changes, then the URL will no longer point to the object.  A DOI (or other PID) overcomes this problem by continuing to provide access to the object regardless of its location.

A DOI will therefore provide long term discoverability of your work and will assist with accurate citations and metrics analysis.

You can also use your DOIs in your social media and other communications to link readers directly to your research outputs.

DOIs assigned by publishers

When your work is accepted for publication by an academic publisher, a DOI will usually be assigned and maintained by the publisher.

Obtain a DOI using Figshare 

You can deposit your research output in Figshare at RMIT to get a DOI. There are several benefits of using Figshare:

  • A DOI is automatically generated when you deposit your output.
  • Figshare is indexed by major research tools such as Altmetric, Google (including Google Scholar and Google Dataset Search), Data Citation Index, DataCite, DataMed, Dimensions and PubMed LinkOut.
  • You can upload non-traditional research outputs (NTROs) such as creative works, figures, datasets, media, code, papers, theses, posters, presentations, and file sets.
  • If you don’t want to or can’t upload your output (e.g. an artwork or website) you can still create a record in Figshare describing the item and get a DOI for this record.

Find out more about Figshare on the Research data management guide.

Other persistent identifiers

There are many other kinds of persistent identifiers besides DOIs. These include codes such as ISBNs or ISSNs for books and journals respectively, which distinguish them unique textual objects.

In the research environment there are other digital persistent identifier schemes with associated resolvers which retrieve the objects they identify on the web. These digital schemes include HANDL, PURL, ARK, XRI, and LSID. Different schemes may be preferred by different research communities.

Learn more about different persistent identifiers: