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How to Think About Your Research Outreach

Should I be posting online about my research?

Paula de la Cruz-Fernández

Mar 6

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Reading Stephanie’s first post about the researchers’ digital toolkit and the interest it’s generating is encouraging. It shows a growing awareness that being visible online is part of the work of being a researcher in the twenty-first century.

Digital publishing changes the scale and direction of the reach of our ideas.

The question is not whether to be visible, but how to do it in a way that reflects the quality and seriousness of the research itself.

Your Research Needs to Be Found - So Make it Public

Not all research needs a viral moment. But all research matters (or should matter) socially — I agree with the authors of the new book Social Media for Research Impact: How Scholars Can Share Ideas, Build Networks, and Make a Difference that researchers “are doing research because they want their work to have an impact on the world,” and so it also should be findable.

Since the late 2010s, attention has shifted towards the digital space. In the US, in 2018, social media outpaced newspapers as a source of news for the first time. This also means that both the public and information providers have sought to have a presence, resulting in information overload and uneven verification standards, alongside evidence for declining trust and growing news and information saturation.

So when sharing research briefs, findings, visual abstracts, or videos online, we translate rigorous evidence-based research and findings into accessible, digestible formats. In doing so, we contribute to the body of knowledge that is available to the public. That translation, as researchers, is part of our responsibility.

The Network Is Still Everything — But It’s Bigger Now

Conferences remain the heart of academic life, providing essential space for networking, collaboration, and feedback. In fact, that was the reason I applied years ago to be the Web editor of the Business History Conference; I wanted to stay in the loop even though I was not following a traditional academic track.

Peer review is equally indispensable; I highly recommend the article “Revise and resubmit? Peer reviewing business historical research,” by leading figures in business history, to understand where the field stands in this regard. Your peers know the literature, think about your topic daily, and teach it. Hopefully, the speed and often unchecked engagement of the internet will never replace the depth of intellectual engagement in the peer review process.

However, digital platforms can effectively extend that physical network. It doesn’t take much effort to start, and they are one of the few direct channels you control. It’s important, however, to reflect on your goals behind publishing your research online. Used intentionally, they become your opening to a wider intellectual community.

For starters, and for all researchers -

Keep your digital profiles up to date, as noted in the post The Newly Published Researcher’s Toolkit, that includes ORCID, ResearchGate, and your university profile.

If you choose to be on LinkedIn, where there is enough space to write, cite generously and strategically. Don’t make your online presence purely self-promotional. Cite an influential scholar; their network will notice. Reference the publications and outlets you read to appear on their radar. Doors often open from there.

Publish about your work, but also, build your group; find three to five scholars whose work complements yours. Share each other’s publications and tag one another.

Campaign kindly; Prof. Anne-Wil Harzing calls it “positive academia” for a reason. Make digital publishing work for you, and for the public good. I would add kind to this – there is no need to criticize someone publicly if you cannot do so kindly and constructively. If the feedback is sensitive or personal, DM or email.

Always include the full DOI permanent link to your publication; help everyone access your piece directly.

Leverage Google Scholar alerts; when you receive a notification that someone has cited your work, use it as a moment to connect. Thank them, share their piece, and start a conversation.

Update Wikipedia: AI models are fed articles from the encyclopedia as well as other freely accessible content. Identify Wikipedia articles related to your expertise, edit them, and add accurate references.

Curate via hashtags; it is a great way to organize and track discussion around a specific topic on LinkedIn especially. Use the same hashtag every time you post about that theme. Over time, it becomes a simple indexing system. Click on the hashtag, and you get a curated feed of posts connected to that topic - your own and others’. It also creates a public archive that shows how your thinking evolves.

Engage on ResearchGate by following peers and recommending papers on the platform. Every time you do, not only is the author notified, but your followers also see the recommendation.

Publish your research or personal website; this is a step further, but your digital footprint becomes a record over time of what you worked on, what you cared about, who you engaged with, and how your ideas circulated. People will search your name or your topic. When they do, you want them to find a clear and accurate account of your work. After nearly a decade working in this space, I can say that it is still surprisingly difficult to find basic, reliable information about some scholars’ research.

Think intentionally where to show up; there are dozens of platforms, but building a digital identity doesn’t require doing everything at once. Maybe you just commit to LinkedIn. Maybe you launch a Substack. Or, reach further, pitch op-eds to public or private outlets: The Conversation, Slate, Sage Perspectives, and publisher blogs (Taylor & Francis, for example) all offer pathways to reach readers beyond academia.

The British Academy of Management now publishes Business Research Unpacked, which seeks to make research insights accessible to a wider audience.

These are different from peer review, but they create new outlets 🚪 for your ideas — and they matter for impact. After one comes another.

As an example, when you click *share* on your article’s page on Taylor & Francis’ website, this is the list of social platforms you can choose from to share your publication. Accessed on February 23, as I prepared a campaign for a recently published collection in Business History

You Don’t Need To Be Everywhere. But You Should Be Somewhere With Intention 🚀

Not every paper needs the same campaign. But every publication benefits from a little strategic effort. Here are some things to do in the days and weeks after an academic article comes out:

Assemble a short list of scholars who would genuinely find the work relevant. Email them directly with a brief summary — not your abstract, but a conversational note about why you think they’d find it interesting. In that email, consider asking whether they’d recommend it on ResearchGate.
Identify organizations that might care. Think beyond your department. Policy institutes, NGOs, professional associations, and media outlets may all have reason to share or engage with your findings.
Think about media outlets that might be interested in the real-world issue you are ultimately talking about. See, for example, the latest case study by business historian Prof Shane Hamilton for the Urban Institute: https://www.urban.org/author/shane-hamilton.
Write one social media post — even just one — that frames the work for a general audience. What’s the real-world question it addresses? Frame it as: Is this progress? And how do we know? Create a visual or video that’s on social platforms, and your publisher might even welcome the idea of publishing the visual as part of your publication.
Use links and tags. This is how search engine optimization works. Link to the journal, tag co-authors and relevant scholars, cite the outlet. Every link is a thread connecting your work to a wider web. Do your research from your profile’s activity. Check, for example, on LinkedIn, what posts have you liked in the last 2 months?
Don’t obsess about immediate results. And this is important! Digital visibility compounds over time. A post that gets three likes today may surface in someone’s search six months from now. Consistency matters more than any single viral moment.

It can be quite straightforward, but it does take (lots of) time and planning. Regardless of your article sitting behind a paywall or open access, share key findings, a short summary, a visual, or a thread that explains why the results matter. This way the research becomes more visible and usable beyond its original publication.

There are some tools that help you track and document that reach. Platforms like SAGE Policy Profiles and Altmetric allow you to see where your research has been cited, mentioned in policy documents, or discussed publicly. Also, you can contact me to work on your digital profile or for campaigns about your work.

I may need to take Stephanie’s advice and take writing a book more seriously. A step-by-step checklist for promoting a new book or article might be a useful resource.

And I can also work directly with you to plan a structured digital strategy tailored to your profile and long-term goals. (Thanks to Stephanie for giving me the space to write here. Together with Neil Rollings, she hired me as Social Media Editor of Business History 🙏✨.)