The Secret To Maximizing Your Academic Impact

Have you reached a plateau in your academic career?

You seek advice from your supervisors; look for the external opportunity from external recruiters, etc. But nothing seems functional. You can not foresee the bright future.

But the clock is ticking; competition for funding is fierce; peers' outputs are hugely growing. You wish someone will show you how to open a secret door to maximize your impact.

The truth is hope is never a strategy.

So what should your strategy be?

Before you develop your strategy, you need answer the key question "how do you build your impact?"

You might think of changing the world or bringing new technology or leading people to a better life.

As a matter of fact, in modern digitalsociety, social media bring up a brand new definition for "impact".

The impact is built on READERSHIP.

That is to say; everyone can build his or her impact through the internet.

Unlike in the traditional world "impact factor (IF)" was the only method deployed to assess the quality of academic work (Internal impact); in the modern digital, world impact is widely captured as some form of "digital footprint"(External impact). Therefore, there could be many different ways of demonstrating impact, including a record of citation, discussion, Email, blog, referencing or use of a piece of research.

When you look at the CVs of big academics, they've done all the communication to increase their awareness--conferences; networking; conversation; websites; email; social network; blog, etc.

Understand research has an internal impact and an external impact, we can develop a strategy based on that.

Internal impact

Publications are still at the heart of internal impact. The young researchers are advised to publish papers in high impact (IF) journals. High IF are the "currency of fame" in academia, which leads to an invitation to talks and reviewers for scientific journals. Also, high IF lead to more public funding in academic.

However, the citation patterns for the three main types of publications are as:

Most of academics citation rate will grow steadily in their early career and reach a plateau fairly soon.

The most successful academics will not only benefit from the short-term blips of citations but will add layers of continuing citations from publication planning.

Here is a great example that planning publications for a research (Adjuvant therapy for CRC) creates 7 years continuous exposure via conferences, posters and manuscripts.

 External impact

Compared to turning to the traditional citation metrics IF to increase your impact awareness, new academics are increasingly turning to social media to engage audiences in a new way.

More and more academics working in healthcare have Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts (Chinese academics have a preference for weChat). Regardless of platform, there are a few key factors that can help in maximizing your impact:

• Visibility:

1) Promote your articles by presenting it in conference and social media.

2) Explain the significance of your research in simple language.

3) Growing your professional social media networks.

4) Update your project and share what you are doing.

5) Engage in talks and discussions.

• Consistency

1) Use the same name in all your publications and your presence.

2) Consistently demonstrate your focus. If your page shows that you comment everything, which is a sign that you are not focusing on anything.

• Availability

1) Manage your SEO for internet search, that is to say, optimize the key words.

2) Have a data management plan.

Picture resource: Kudos, LSE Public Policy Group and Roche. 

For more information, please visit EME Pharma Consultants.