A beginner's guide to manuscript publication: Your paper is published, now what?

In the first two parts of this series, “A Beginner's Guide to Manuscript Publication,” we provided guidance on getting your manuscript off the ground1 and navigating the revision and resubmission process.2 In this third installment, we provide guidance on how to make sure your work, once published, receives the attention and readership it deserves. With rapid growth in the number of academic journals, the advent of Open Access journals,3 and the sheer number of scientific articles being published (over five million in the year 2022),4 it can feel like an uphill battle to get readers' eyes on your paper. Gone are the days of authors passively waiting for a printed issue to gain the reader's attention. The modern publishing process has expanded beyond “publication” being the final step and now includes dissemination and reader engagement (Figure 1). These newer components offer you, as a modern author, an opportunity to enhance the potential impact of your work. This requires the recognition that the measure of an article's impact has also evolved in recent years. For decades, the primary metric of success was measured as the number of times an article is cited. While easy to calculate, this metric has shortcomings, as citations take time to accumulate and may not reflect immediate readership or overall usefulness. The rapid uptake of social media by the academic and scientific communities in recent years has changed how we disseminate our work and measure its impact. Given this new paradigm, it is imperative that authors know and understand how to disseminate their work postpublication. Alternative metrics (e.g., Altmetrics), online-based bibliometrics that include clicks to hyperlinked articles, page views, and social media shares, are a new way of measuring an article's real-time impact. To use a simple analogy, we believe that failing to actively disseminate your published work after publication is akin to scoring a touchdown but opting not to attempt the extra point. One can make several plays to score this “extra point,” including presenting locally and at larger conferences, creating novel content to highlight the work (such as visual abstracts), and sharing on social media. We outline strategies to help authors disseminate their work in the postpublication phase as a means to maximize the overall impact of their work. Always disseminate locally… While a well-platformed publication may garner national attention, local dissemination and engagement remain incredibly important and are often overlooked. Many junior faculty erroneously assume that their section, division, or department leaders are aware of all the academic success within their institution. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Thus, circulating your work at your own institution is the first step in any dissemination plan and will let your leadership know of your successes. There are several ways to disseminate your work locally. First, if self-dissemination seems intimidating, find a local sponsor who will celebrate the accomplishment and share with others. While it is often helpful for this sponsor to be a senior colleague, we have found lateral colleagues (i.e., persons of the same or lower rank) can be just as good at enthusiastically sharing and disseminating your work. Second, ensure your section or division leadership and department chair know about your publication by providing them with a link and description of the work. Additionally, send an article link, description, social media handles, and contact information to those in charge of divisional or departmental communications. They can share the work in your department's newsletter or e-mail updates. Third, ask your department's Public Relations team to partner with you to craft a dissemination strategy. Some work is best disseminated within professional circles, either locally or nationally, while other work may warrant an official press release to be shared with local and national media. Most research shared by national media outlets is first publicized by local newspapers or radio stations. We recommend assisting in composing the press release, as the nuances and scientific details can often be misinterpreted or misconstrued. Remember that brevity is your ally, so keep it short. Be factual, not promotional, and request to proofread the final draft.5 Fourth, offer to present your work at your local grand rounds, as these traditional forums are valuable ways to share your successes and work with your colleagues and institutional leadership. …but also, look beyond your institution. While local dissemination is important, there is a broader national (and international) landscape in which to disseminate your ideas and network. Our experience as digital media editors at the Journal of Hospital Medicine has taught us that an effective social media dissemination plan can ensure your article garners the engagement it deserves. Articles with social media promotion are accessed five times as often as articles without it, and article downloads may increase up to tenfold with an effective social media strategy.6 The easiest and simplest way to disseminate your work is to create a social media post about the article with a link to the online publication. An engaging post can include a clever turn of phrase, praising and tagging co-authors, or using emojis to complement the text. Although clever wording can go far, to maximize engagement on social media, a visual is often needed. According to JHM social media data (acquired through X, formerly known as Twitter), people are three times more likely to engage with posts that include visual content than with posts that lack it. Though social media algorithms are often opaque, they generally prioritize more popular posts based on the number of interactions (likes, reposts, comments, etc.). While a simple screenshot of the article title and authors, or one of the tables or graphs included in the publication can serve as the image, visual abstracts7—a type of infographic in which images are used to summarize the article's content—have been embraced by many scientific and medical journals as a novel way to convey ideas quickly and easily.8 Visual abstracts typically use bold images, concise captions containing quotes from the article, or brief bullet points to convey the take-home message of the article. The primary goal of a visual abstract is to capture the reader's attention and then prompt them to further explore the paper by clicking on the associated link or downloading the article. A visual abstract can garner twice the clicks and article views compared to a screenshot of the article title alone9 and three to seven times the engagement of a tweet with text only.10, 11 Even if the accepting journal has not adopted this practice, numerous free computer programs or apps are available to assist in creating visual abstracts (Table 1). Visual abstracts serve to capture readers' attention, while social media threads (aka Tweetorials) serve to provide educational content. Tweetorials12 are linked or “threaded” posts that expand on ideas presented in the initial post and allow for a deeper dive into the ideas and materials being discussed. These “long form” posts give you the opportunity to explain the nuances and intricacies of your work that visual abstracts do not allow. We advise planning and composing the thread in advance because, on most social media platforms, once the first post is released, the subsequent posts must be added quickly to maintain reader interest and engagement. We also suggest enriching your thread using videos, images, GIFs, and audience polling to promote active learning and test knowledge retention.13 Putting it all together These engagement strategies can build on one another and produce other opportunities to share your work and grow your academic network. As you employ these strategies, you can gather both local (as discussed above) and national sponsors (such as the journal's social media accounts or other prominent social media accounts in your field, who may choose to share your eye-catching post) via social media. We highlight that use of visual abstracts not only creates engagement on the Tweets themselves, but also increases engagement with your other Tweets11—growing your influence, professional network, and impact on your field. This social media networking can help extend the work beyond the published article, potentially into regional and national presentations—increasing the impact of your work on larger stages. Occasionally, the subject of your work lends itself to creating a workshop, which can be submitted for presentation at a regional or national meeting. Herein is another opportunity for networking and sponsorship as you invite other clinicians with whom you have connected through your paper, or perhaps junior faculty, to co-present with you. National presentations and workshops are opportunities to create more conversations about your work, often in a more informal tone that may invite colleagues beyond the audience of the journal in which the work was published.14 Finally, when presenting your work, consider working with conference or journal staff to extend the impact of your work and the conference itself. This can include highlighting key points on social media for those who could not attend the conference15 (don't forget to include conference hashtags!), and creating live abstracts (which combine the best of both visual abstracts and Tweetorials) to provide real-time, visually appealing commentaries to increase dissemination and engagement with your material. Embrace the modern publication paradigm! The postpublication process has evolved immensely over the past several years. H-index and other measures of citation are no longer the sole measures of the success of an article. Alternative metrics and reader engagement have become important aspects of measuring and increasing impact. The modern author must recognize this paradigm shift and should leverage all possible dissemination pathways. It takes significant effort to carry scholarly work in for the touchdown that is publishing, but to make the most out of that work, one must always attempt the “extra point.” Dr. Charlie M. Wray is supported by a VA Health Services Research and Development Career Development Award (IK2HX003139-01A2). The authors work as editors for the Journal of Hospital Medicine.