research visibility meaning

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How to increase the visibility of your research, introduction, 1. get unique author identifier orcid to distinguish yourself and your work from that of all other researchers., 2. share outputs of your research, 3. create and keep up to date online profile (or a web cv), 4. engage in social networking communities, 6. post on x (formerly twitter).

Activities aimed at promoting research are increasingly important in researchers’ work.  By making your research visible and accessible you increase chances of your research being noticed, used and having impact, thus increasing your own reputation and chances of success in your academic work. 

Researchers are embracing a variety of activities and tools to promote work, connect with other researchers, and engage in scholarly discourse.  Increasingly, the activities related to promoting their research take place at all stages of the research process: from the discovery stage, through analysis and writing process, through to publishing, outreach, and  assessment.  101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication project from University of Utrecht (see below) provides a comprehensive mapping of traditional and newer tools to aid research process.   

In this guide you will find descriptions of six steps to increased visibility and impact of research activity, and recommendations of tools that can help in this process. 

• You can find out more about ORCID, create new ORCID or to link your existing ORCID to University of Pittsburgh information systems here.

Publications, preprints, conference papers and posters, presentations, research data, video, code are all evidence of your research activity.  By making them all publicly accessible you increase your visibility, preserve your outputs and make them available for future use.  Moreover, many research funders in the US and overseas require that both publications and underlying data are made available in open access.  A comprehensive list of open access requirement for US Federal, US private and international funders can be found at Carnegie Mellon University Library website .

Great places to make your research outputs available openly are institutional and subject repositories.   OpenDOAR  is a comprehensive database of open access repositories.     

At the University of Pittsburgh, you can deposit your research outputs in d-Scholarship .  d-Scholarship can ingest many types of research outputs (including publications, pre-prints, working papers, slides and presentations, dissertations, video and some data sets), is committed to ongoing preservation of these outputs, is indexed by Google for improved discoverability and use and provides statistics of use and impact of deposited materials.  

Popular publication subject repositories include:

• AgEcon (Agriculture and Applied Economics) maintained by University of Minnesota's Department of Applied Economics 
• ArXiv   - (pre-prints in  Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics)  Currently maintained by Cornell University Library
• CiteSeer  - (Computer and Information Science)  maintained by College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University
• PhilPapers   - (Philosophy) maintained by the Center for Digital Philosophy at University of Western Ontario
• PubMedCentral   - is a repository for US federally funded research outputs in Medicine.  It is required for all publications supported by NIH (and some other US federal agencies) funding to be deposited in PubMedCentral.   This site explains the mandate and the process.

Research Papers in Economics (Repec)  is a collaborative effort of volunteers in 86 countries  to enhance the dissemination of research in economics and related sciences. It is a bibliographic database of working papers, journal articles, books, books chapters and software components.

• Social Science Research Network  (SSRN)  - aims at early dissemination of social science, business, law and economics research.  It allows for deposit of both abstract of working papers and upcoming publications as well as full text of published outputs. 

Sharing research data 

A comprehensive list of subject specific and general science data repositories can be found here .  General science repositories, such as  figshare ,  Dryad Digital Repository  or Mendeley Data , handle a variety of data and may be appropriate for storage of associated analyses, or experimental-control data, as a supplement to the primary data record. Some data sets can also be deposited in University of Pittsburgh’s institutional repository d-Scholarship.  Find out more about this option here .

Sharing other research outputs

​ Slideshare,   while not exclusive to the research community ,  is great for sharing your presentations.  It supports PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote and OpenDocument file types and provides basic usage statistics. F1000Research is an option for researchers in life sciences.  It allows for free deposit of research posters and presentations ( please note that publishing articles on the website incurs processing fees ).  If you develop code, GitHub  may be a great place to deposit it.      

T hese could be simply your personal and institutional web pages or commercial services allowing you to highlight your professional accomplishments and areas of expertise.  Below you will see a more detailed description of  few such tools.  These tools, apart from simply allowing you to list your research outputs will also provide you with additional information relating to their use and impact (for instance, citation counts, downloads or attention on the social web). 

•  Sign to your Google account, or create one if you don't yet have one. Use a personal account, not an account at your    employer, so that you can keep your profile for as long as you wish.
• Once you've signed in to your Google account, the  Citations sign up form  will ask you to confirm the spelling of your name, and to enter your affiliation, interests, etc. Enter your university email address which would make your profile eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar search results.
• Next, you'll see groups of articles written by people with names similar to yours. Click "Add all articles" next to each article group that is yours, or "See all articles" to add specific articles from that group. If you don't see your articles in these groups, click "Search articles" to do a regular Google Scholar search, and then add your articles one at a time. 
• Once you're done with adding articles, GS will ask you what to do when the article data changes in Google Scholar. You can either have the updates applied to your profile automatically, or you can choose to review them beforehand. In either case, you can always go to your profile and make changes by hand.
• Finally, you will see your profile. This is a good time to add a few finishing touches - upload your professional looking photo, visit your university email inbox and click on the verification link, double check the list of articles, and, once you're completely satisfied, make your profile public. Voila - it's now eligible to appear in Google Scholar when someone searches for your name!

Impactstory gets its data from Altmetric.com, Mendeley and X for tracing impact and CrossRef and ORCID for identity management and metadata.   

Kudos will monitor:

• number of tweets posted by author to promote the publication
• number of Facebook posts by author to promote the publication
• number of times author has sent email to colleagues/friends with link the 
publication page on Kudos or with the link to the article page on the publisher’s site
• number of visits to the publication page on Kudos that is generated by 
sharing activities via email or social media
• total number of visits to publication page on Kudos
• number of times the publication is downloaded from the publisher’s 
site
• number of times the publication’s abstract is clicked on or viewed on the 
publisher’s site
• a score generated by Altmetric.com (which includes tweets, Mendeley and 
CiteULike readership)


A brief YouTube video from Kudos provides more details.   

Another great way to disseminate your research and gain reputation is through active engagement in research networking communities.  These services will allow you to create profiles, showcase your research outputs, identify communities of interest and participate in discussions by posting and answering questions in your network.  All of them will also let you know about impact of your activates in these networks, for instance downloads of your publications, views of your profile and levels of your activity as compared to others in the network.

Blogging is also a great tool for making your research content more visible.  When you write a blog post, you are creating content that can be freely shared via social media.  Blogs content is freely available and not limited by publisher restrictions thus potentially reaching and influencing much wider and diverse audiences.  With a blog you can become part of a network with whom you can share ideas and engage in discourse in your area of interest.  This can enhance your reputation as an expert in your field, allow you to gain valuable feedback on ideas and broaden your professional network. 

Kelly Oaks, a Guardian science writer has the following suggestions for those interested in starting a blog:

• Have a decent profile picture and text - this is how people will find you. 
• Use the X search (or Google search) to find topics that interest you - this will allow you to find and follow people working in your area - and they may, in turn, follow you back.  If someone follows you, unless they are selling snake oil, follow them back.
• Look out for hash tags for events in your field (conferences/seminars).  Follow them, even (some would say, especially) if you aren’t there.  Comment on posts that interest you or where you have something to say.
• Set up search alerts to keep abreast of activity that’s of interest to you.
• Post when your community is most active, and most likely to see your stuff.  Use a service like Buffer to schedule posts if you are normally tied up in labs or classes when your audience is active.
• Make use of X lists to organize people you follow into thematic groups so that you don’t miss key things.

Is the effort of blogging or posting really worth your time?   Read here about experiences of Melissa Terras , Director of University College London Centre for Digital Humanities, who took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience responded with a huge leap in interest in her work.

• Last Updated: Jan 4, 2024 3:21 PM
• URL: https://pitt.libguides.com/researchvisibility

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Ten tips to improve the visibility and dissemination of research for policy makers and practitioners

J. p. tripathy.

1 International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union), South-East Asia Office, New Delhi, India

A. Bhatnagar

H. d. shewade, a. m. v. kumar, r. zachariah.

2 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Brussels Operational Centre, MSF Luxembourg, Luxembourg

A. D. Harries

3 The Union, Paris, France

4 London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom

Effective dissemination of evidence is important in bridging the gap between research and policy. In this paper, we list 10 approaches for improving the visibility of research findings, which in turn will hopefully contribute towards changes in policy. Current approaches include using social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn); sharing podcasts and other research outputs such as conference papers, posters, presentations, reports, protocols, preprint copy and research data (figshare, Zenodo, Slideshare, Scribd); and using personal blogs and unique author identifiers (ORCID, ResearcherID). Researchers and funders could consider drawing up a systematic plan for dissemination of research during the stage of protocol development.

Une dissémination efficace des résultats de recherche est cruciale pour combler le fossé qui existe entre la recherche et la politique de santé, ainsi que sa mise en œuvre. Dans cet article, nous énumérons 10 approches visant à améliorer la visibilité des résultats de la recherche qui vont, si tout va bien, à leur tour contribuer au changement en matière de politique. Les approches actuelles incluent le recours aux réseaux sociaux (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), le partage de podcasts et d'autres résultats de recherche comme des documents de conférences, des affiches, des présentations, des rapports, des protocoles, des photocopies, des données de recherche (figshare, Zenodo, Slideshare, Scribd), l'utilisation d'un blog personnel et un identifiant unique de l'auteur (ORCID, ResearcherID). Les chercheurs et les financeurs pourraient envisager d'ébaucher un plan systématique de dissémination de la recherche dès l'élaboration du protocole.

Es importante lograr una difusión eficaz de las pruebas científicas, con el objeto de superar la brecha que existe entre la investigación y las políticas y las prácticas. En el presente artículo se mencionan diez enfoques que mejoran la visibilidad de los resultados de las investigaciones, con la intención de que contribuyan a su vez a la modificación de las políticas. Las estrategias vigentes incluyen la utilización de las redes sociales (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), el intercambio de las redifusiones multimedia (podcasts) y de otros productos de las investigaciones como son los artículos, los afiches, las presentaciones en las conferencias, los informes, los protocolos, los manuscritos antes de su publicación, los datos de investigación (figshare, Zenodo, Slideshare, Scribd) y la utilización de bitácoras personales (blogs) y de los identificadores únicos de los investigadores (ORCID, ResearcherID). Los investigadores y las instituciones patrocinadoras deben procurar la elaboración de un plan sistemático de difusión de las investigaciones durante la etapa de preparación del protocolo.

The full potential for research evidence to influence changes in decision-making and policy and practice is not yet being realised. 1 Keeping in mind the growing interest in bridging the gap between research and policy and practice, effective dissemination in an appropriate format is of vital importance. If we wish to maximise the benefits of publication and its eventual influence on policy and practice, there are a number of actions that can be taken before and after the paper is published.

As Danny Iny wrote in his blog, ‘Sure, content is king—but without an audience, the king can get awfully lonely’. 2 Even when the content is great it does not find an audience on its own. There is thus a need for a strategy to find and attract an audience.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a number of dissemination tools are available to researchers, including research reports, peer-reviewed publications, press releases and policy briefs. 3 In today's world of information overload, the scholarly community is also turning its attention to the use of social media and other online platforms. Not surprisingly, in recent years academics have shown a growing interest in non-traditional methods of evaluating their scholarly ‘impact’. These alternative metrics, known as ‘altmetrics’, allow researchers to gauge the impact and reach of their research in the social web beyond the traditional science citation count and journal impact factors.

In this paper, we enlist 10 ‘can't miss’ approaches to improve the visibility of research findings, which will in turn hopefully contribute towards changes in policy and/or practice, although we acknowledge the fact that application of research findings in making decisions about health care is complex. Effective dissemination, however, is certainly the way to get people talking about it ( Table ).

Ten tips to improve the visibility and dissemination of research findings

10 TIPS FOR IMPROVING RESEARCH VISIBILITY

Expand your co-authorship base.

In addition to the usual benefit of bringing new expertise and ideas to the paper, co-authoring with a diverse group of colleagues helps to disseminate research findings more widely. 4 , 5 To impact changes in policy and/or practice, potential policy makers should be engaged early on, preferably right from the conception of the research question, through the conduct of the study and to eventual publication. The approach of involving policy makers early on in the process fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility, which is key to bringing about any change in policy and/or practice. 6 , 7

Select your title and keywords wisely

Title and keywords have the potential to significantly impact the chances of getting picked up when searched, read, cited and included in systematic reviews that synthesise evidence on an issue. 8

Journals, search engines, and indexing and abstracting services classify papers using keywords. An accurate list of keywords will therefore ensure correct indexing and help showcase the research to attract interested groups. It is best to select keywords from a list of key terms/phrases that are used repeatedly in the text and preferably not repeated in the title or abstract. It is recommended to use the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) tool to choose keywords. MeSH is a comprehensive, controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books for the MEDLINE database (US National Library of Medicine ® , Bethesda, MD, USA). The title should be simple, clear and catchy, while describing the study appropriately. It is strategic to think about terms that readers might use to search for the study and include them in the title. Abbreviations and jargon are best avoided.

Make your articles open access

Open access articles have the advantage of being accessible to all readers free of charge, including policy makers, which increases the chance of being cited by the readers. 9–11 Publishing in an open access journal will make the paper available to all readers free of charge.

Self-archiving is the act of the author depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide immediate open access to it. ResearchGate (Berlin, Germany) and Academia.edu (San Francisco, CA, USA) are free online repositories where published work can be shared for wider circulation and greater visibility of research and where there can be better connection and interaction with peers. Authors can also put their articles in institutional repositories, but prior to doing so it is important to check on the self-archiving policy of the publisher. For example, the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Geneva, Switzerland) repository ( http://fieldresearch.msf.org/msf/ ) hosts full free-text articles on field research conducted in several countries published in over 100 peer-reviewed journals.

Effective use of online social media

Many studies have shown that there is a statistically significant correlation between social media mentions such as posts, tweets, blogs and citation counts. 12 , 13

Authors need to engage with individuals and groups within and beyond academia, including key policy influencers and decision makers, and with individuals with shared interests through Facebook posts (Facebook Inc, San Francisco, CA, USA) and tweets, joining Linked In (LinkedIn Corp, Mountain View, CA, USA), Academia.edu and other groups, sharing research and commenting on blogs. There needs to be proactive engagement with researchers, non-governmental organisations, patient groups or other groups that might be interested in the work, and to engage them through various online social platforms. Policy makers or key decision makers/influencers also need to be engaged through various social media channels to keep them informed of the research evidence generated ( Figure ).

Improving visibility and dissemination of research.

Authors can create an account on Twitter (Twitter Inc, San Francisco, CA, USA) ( https://twitter.com/ ) and add a short description of 160 characters or less stating their experience, research interests, organisational affiliation and a link to personal blogs, if any. They can engage with other researchers, policy makers and the public by finding users who share common interests and electing to ‘follow’ them to start receiving their updates. Twitter makes it easy to find other people to follow via their ‘Who to follow’ panel.

Authors can tweet on a variety of subjects: research publications and findings, opinions on a study, news or blogposts relevant to their topics of interest, recent developments in their field. Tagging sector specialist journalists will help in promoting and increasing the searchability of the research paper. Tagging policy makers will bring an author's piece of evidence into the limelight within policy circles.

The hashtag (#) is the most widely used means of classifying content on social media. It makes one's own content searchable and allows one to find relevant content from related areas. The hashtag also allows one to connect with and engage other social media users based on a common theme or interest. The more focused and exact the hashtag, the more targeted the audience will be—and a targeted audience generally means better engagement. Making infographic summaries of research findings helps in gaining attention and rapid dissemination using social media, as images are easier to share.

Every social media platform offers the facility to form thematic groups or clubs. Adding relevant people to a like-minded, subject-related group will create a personalised channel to reach a larger number of target audiences and ensure reception. Do share your social media coordinates for people who want to connect with you.

MethodSpace ( www.methodspace.com ) (Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA), OR network ( http://ornetwork.ning.com/ ) and the Social Science Research Network (SSRN, Rochester, NY, USA) ( http://ssrn.com/en/ ) are social network services for social and medical scientists where one can ask questions on forums, discuss research, connect to other researchers in the field and blog about one's own latest research.

LinkedIn ( www.linkedin.com ) is a professional networking site for professionals in which people can create a profile, connect with peers and network. Authors can list their publications and other research outputs, experiences, skills and current and past positions.

Academia.edu is another multidisciplinary academic networking site. It has a strong profile and curriculum vitae feature and is excellent for showcasing achievements, publications and expertise. Available measures of impact include counts for profile views, document views, document downloads, unique visitors, external links to documents, geographic distribution of visitors and referrals.

Create and share podcasts

Creating a podcast (an audio or video file in digital format for automatic download over the Internet) describing the research project and key findings and posting it to YouTube (YouTube LLC, San Bruno, CA, USA) or Vimeo (InterActive Corp, New York, NY, USA), or sharing them in social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or your personal blog, will help in rapid dissemination.

Sharing research outputs other than the manuscript

In addition to published articles, preprints, conference papers and posters, presentations, reports, working papers, protocols, preprint copy, research data and videos are all evidence of your research activity. By making them all publicly accessible you can increase visibility, preserve your output and make it available for future use.

Slideshare (LinkedIn Corp, Mountain View, CA, USA) and Scribd (Scribd Inc, San Francisco, CA, USA), while not exclusive to the research community, are useful for sharing presentations and keynotes and providing basic usage statistics. F1000 Research (Science Navigation Group, London, UK) is an option for researchers in the life sciences that allows free deposit of research posters and presentations. Publishing research data in Data Dryad (Dryan, Durham, NC, USA) or via multi-purpose services such as figshare (London, UK) ( http://figshare.com/ ) or Zenodo (Geneva, Switzerland) ( https://zenodo.org/ ) for a range of outputs will improve visibility.

Create a personal blog

Create a personal blog where you can share your thoughts, research ideas and/or key findings, promote your work, or write case studies of how your work has impacted others. Blogging platforms such as wordpress.com (Automattic Inc, San Francisco, CA, USA) or tumblr.com (Tumblr Inc, New York, NY, USA) are quick and easy tools for creating a blog.

Get a unique author identifier ORCID to distinguish yourself and your work from other researchers.

Using a consistent name throughout a research career facilitates easy retrieval of a researcher's output. Common problems with a consistent author name include inconsistent name formats, legal name changes, highly similar names or common names, which can make it difficult to associate research output to the correct author.

It has been suggested that using an author identification system such as ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) (ORCID Inc, Bethesda, MD, USA) or ResearcherID (Thomson Reuters Corp, New York, NY, USA) could help. ORCID IDs are permanent identifiers for researchers. They protect your unique scholarly identity and help you keep your publication record updated with very little effort. After you have created an ORCID account, you can link it to your Google Scholar (Google Inc, Mountain View, CA, USA) and LinkedIn profiles, your personal website and any other websites where you have a scholarly profile.

Lay language policy briefs/evidence summaries for policy makers

A lay language policy brief is a short, to the point, jargon-free document written for non-specialists, especially policy makers or those who can influence policy. It presents research findings/evidence to policy actors and other key stakeholders, highlighting the relevance of the specific research to policy and offering recommendations for change. This is an effective way of bringing important research to the attention of policy actors as they can be read in a short amount of time.

Other tools for dissemination

Present your study findings at conferences or any academic gatherings. Include your Twitter handle and links to some of your profiles in presentations, an e-mail signature and business card. Researchers can use their institutional newsletter/bulletin/local newspaper to disseminate study findings in layman language.

Kudos (Oxford, UK) ( https://www.growkudos.com/ ) and ImpactStory ( https://impactstory.org/ ) are powerful tools that help researchers promote their research outputs together with measures of their impact. They allow authors to showcase their publications by creating links to full texts and including additional information such as a short title, a lay language explanation, an impact statement and links to additional related content, such as underlying data, code, video, slides, or other elements. In addition, it offers a streamlined process for sharing your content via social media and allows you to monitor the results of that activity through the number of tweets, posts, visits, downloads and views, and a score generated by Altmetric.com .

Google Scholar is by far the most widely used bibliographical tool for scholarly publications. Create an account in Google Scholar and go to ‘My citation’. The profile shows your list of publications in Google Scholar, with basic metrics. You can use the citation alert in Google Scholar to notify you whenever your article is cited in the scholarly web. A benefit of Google Scholar Profiles is that they function as a landing page for your name and your publications, although this functionality only works if your profile is set to Public. Thus it increases the ‘Google-ability’ of your profile.

To highlight a real project experience, in the European project SOPHIE (Evaluating the Impact of Structural Policies on Health Inequalities and Their Social Determinants and Fostering Change), dissemination was one of the key objectives to achieve the purpose of fostering policy change based on research findings. The use of online platforms (website, Twitter, and Slideshare), production of informative videos, partnership with civil society organisations and organisation of final concluding scientific events enabled wider dissemination within the scientific community, civil society, and policy circles, and influenced public view on the impact on health and equity of certain policies. 14 Similarly, the Agency for Healthcare Research Quality, through their Translating Research into Practice (TRIP) initiative, has shown commitment in disseminating research results through a dissemination framework involving multiple methods and tools which has led to improved patient care practices, thus ultimately making the health care system safer. 15

Considering the key role of dissemination in knowledge translation continuum, funders should demand some commitment or effort on the part of grant holders to disseminate the findings of their research. The Economic and Social Research Council, UK, has made a dissemination framework available to grant applicants or holders. 16 A plan of dissemination including a social media strategy or any of the dissemination products such as a project video, monograph, newsletter, bulletin, press release, policy brief, poster, infographic summary, dissemination workshop or project website, etc., could be budgeted in the grant proposal.

Given the current emphasis on enhancing the uptake of evidence into routine practice and policy making, both researchers and funders could consider drawing up a systematic plan for research dissemination during the stage of proposal development. Re searchers should learn the art of using social media and other on line platforms to increase the dissemination of their work. Involvement of policy influencers and decision makers right from the beginning of the conception of the research question is the most crucial step in enhancing policy uptake.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to A Ramsay, Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, for his valuable comments while preparing the manuscript. The authors thank the Department for International Development, London, UK, for funding the Global Operational Research Fellowship Programme in which JPT works as an operational research fellow. La Fondation Veuve Emile Metz-Tesch (Luxembourg) supported the open access publication costs. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Conflicts of interest: none declared.

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Increasing the Visibility and Impact of Your Research

• Visibility and Impact
• Managing Your Online Identity
• Making Your Scholarly Work Accessible
• Tracking Your Impact Metrics
• Building Your Narrative

Scholarly Communication Librarian

The Importance of Visibility and Impact

This guide describes a number of strategies and options for that you can use to actively promote your research. Ultimately, the goal of employing these strategies is to increase the visibility and impact of your work, which will enable you to make the case that you have made high quality, influential, and substantive contributions to your discipline and the larger scholarly community.

While the idea of promoting your own work may feel awkward, the fact is that people need to know about your research before they can read it or cite it. When people read and cite your work, this provides you with opportunities for feedback, collaboration, and future projects, and it also increases your reputation within your field. More practically, making and demonstrating impact is frequently a necessary condition for getting hired, promoted, tenured, or for achieving other forms of career advancement.

How do you increase your visibility?

While there is no foolproof formula for increasing the visibility of your work, there are a number of best practices that should become central to your career activities as a researcher. These include:

• Presenting your work at conferences (local, regional, national, and international)
• Attending conferences and society meetings
• Publishing your work in widely read venues
• Engaging with the public 

These sorts of activities are fairly well-known, traditional methods of sharing your work and networking within your field. This guide, however, focuses primarily on more recent developments in scholarly communication that allow scholars to take advantage of digital platforms and services to establish a reputation in their field, and actively monitor the impact of their research. These include:

• Building and maintaining an online identity
• Making your scholarly work accessible
• Tracking your scholarly impact metrics

By engaging in these practices, you will be well positioned to build a narrative of your career and your research program. This narrative will be important at many stages of your career, including annual reviews, applications for tenure and/or promotion, grant proposals, and programatic reviews. 

Consultations for Promotion & Tenure Dossiers

The WVU Libraries offer one on one consultations for WVU faculty developing promotion and tenure dossiers. These consultations are also available to non-tenure-track faculty who are developing scholarly and professional narratives for annual files, grant proposals, program reviews, or other career-related purposes. Faculty and researchers are welcome to make these appointments at any point in their careers and tenure clocks. While the tenure dossier is typically put together during the critical year, early planning will position you to make the strongest case (and hopefully avoid critical year stress!).

During your consultation, we will identify the norms within your department, college, or unit and discuss which metrics are most appropriate for your individual situation. We will also establish goals for your narrative, and examine the ways in which you can support these goals. If you are early in the tenure-track process, we will use a backwards design approach, which will begin by identifying what you want to have when you go up for tenure. We will then work on developing a plan for getting there. 

To schedule a consultation, email  Jonah McAllister-Erickson, Scholarly Communication Librarian . 

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• Last Updated: Aug 9, 2023 4:09 PM
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Research Visibility

Seo for authors: a how-to guide.

• Academic Search Engine Optimization
• How Do Search Engines Rank?

Top Tips to make Your Article Discoverable

Three ways to optimize articles after publication, promoting your article using the internet and social media.

• Peer Networks

Search Engine Optimization can help researchers who publish drive usage, readership and citations of their articles to raise the visibility of their research. Whether an article is being indexed by the academic search engines is crucial, but it is also important where an article lands in the ranked search results list as that ranking will greatly impact the visibility of an author’s research. Items high on the list are more likely to be read.

Access and Citations

Is your article being indexed by academic search engines like Google Scholar, IEEE Xplore and PubMed or is it only accessible via subscription databases the search robots can’t access to index so the contents do not show in academic search engines?

When submitting an article for publication, authors should consider how easily discoverable their research will be to their audience and enhance opportunities for citation. Open-access articles receive more citations than articles accessible only by purchase or subscription.

See University of California Open Access Policy: A How-to Guide .

Authors will benefit from selecting publishers and journals with policies that cooperate with Google Scholar (and other search academic engines) because it makes their published research articles available to more readers and facilitates more citations. Citations are a significant factor in determining rank in results pages of Google Scholar and many other academic search engines . If a journal is not online, authors should favor those who allow authors to put their articles on their or their institutions’ home pages and/ or repositories.

• Think about the most important words that are relevant to the article.
• Consider looking up specific keywords on Google Trends or the  Google Adwords Keywords tool to find out which search terms are popular.
• Try out your keywords in Google Scholar, etc. and if too many results are returned, it may be better to consider a keyword with less competition.
• The title needs to be descriptive and must contain a key phrase related to your topic.
• Put your keywords within the first 65 characters of the title.  Google Scholar considers the length of a title.  In a search for the phrase ‘SEO for Authors: A How-to Guide’ would be ranked higher than one titled ‘Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Authors: Ranking Information and Publishing Tips’.   Although in general titles should be fairly short, we suggest choosing a longer title if there are many relevant keywords.
• Include the keywords and phrases in your abstract that a researcher might search on to find your article.  Provide additional relevant keywords and synonyms for those keywords as they relate to your article keeping in mind those keywords are also used by the abstracting and indexing services as a method to tag the research content. 
• Refer to authors names and initials in a consistent manner throughout the paper and in the same way they’ve been referred to in the past online publications.  If names are used inconsistently, search engines may not be able to id articles or citations correctly; as a consequence, citations may be assigned incorrectly, and articles will not be as highly ranked as they should be.  For instance, Jöran, Joeran, and Joran are all correct spellings of the same name (given different transcription rules), but Google Scholar sees them as three different names. Obtain an ORCID and use it when submitting works to publishers to aid dissambiguation.
• Headings for the various sections of your article tip off search engines to the structure and content of your article.  Incorporate your keywords and phrases in these headings wherever it’s appropriate.
• Academic search engines, and especially Google Scholar, assign  significant  weight to citation counts.  Citations influence whether articles are indexed at all, and they also influence the ranking of articles.  When referencing your own published work, it is important to include a link where that work can be downloaded .  This helps readers to find your article and helps academic search engines to index the referenced articles’ full text. 
• Vector graphics containing font based text should be used instead of rasterized images so it can be indexed by academic search engines.  Graphics stored as JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, or PNG files are not vector graphics.
• When documents are converted to PDF, all metadata should be correct (especially author and title).  Some search engines use PDF metadata to identify the file or to display information about the article on the search engine results page.
• Publish article on the author’s home page and upload it to eScholarship (if author is a UC Faculty it will most likely be harvested via the Publication Management System and then presented to the author for inclusion in the eScholarship repository) so it can be indexed by Google Scholar and other academic search engines. However, it is important to determine that posting or uploading the article does not constitute a violation of the author’s agreement with the publisher. Remember to save your final drafts (pre-publication) so you can submit it to the repository.
• An article that includes outdated words might be replaced by either updating the existing article or publishing a new version on the author’s home page as Google Scholar considers all versions of an article available on the web. Updated articles should be clearly labeled as such so a reader is aware it is a modified version. This procedure may be a violation of an author’s publisher copyright policy so be sure to check first.
• It is important to create meaningful parent web pages for PDF files. This means that Web pages that link to the PDF files should mention the most important keywords and the PDFs metadata (title, author, and abstract).

Once your article is published, employ social media to enhance visibility of the research.  Update everyone in your academic and social networks about your published article.   The number of in-bound links is a factor in search engine ranking.   Share your article within the following social media tools (as appropriate for the research topic):

• LinkedIn  
• Your blog or websites that you contribute to
• Your institution's repository ( eScholarship University of Califormia)
• ResearchGate
• Your website
• Your academic  institution's website
• Wikipeadia (as an appropriate external link)

This guide is a compilation of three documents:

• Jöran Beel, Bela Gipp, and Eik Wilde. Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar and Co . Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 41 (2): 176-190, January 2010. Doi 10.3138/jsp.41.2.176. University of Toronto Press. http://www.beel.org/files/papers/2010-ASEO--preprint.pdf
• Wiley Search Engine Optimization: For Authors
• University of California Open Access Policy: A How-to Guide
• << Previous: How Do Search Engines Rank?
• Next: Publishing >>
• Last Updated: Feb 27, 2024 2:12 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/seo

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How to Improve Your Research Visibility

Academicians worldwide invest considerable time and resources into writing journal articles. But, the focus often shifts once the article is published. Scholars simply move on to the next paper or with their research. While for institutions, it becomes another statistic.

Far from ideal, isn't it? Think about all the effort that went into uncovering those critical insights. Wouldn't it all go to waste when the paper gets lost among thousands of articles published each year? More importantly, it stops other researchers from building on your findings, slowing down scientific progress.

How do you solve this and maximize research impact? The first step should be to improve research visibility. Authors and institutions need to collaborate to ensure their articles are discovered, cited, and discussed. To help you get started, we have listed down a few actionable steps to improve your research visibility.

6 ways to improve research visibility

Research visibility is typically based on how easily discoverable your articles are, how often they are being cited, and by whom. Here are a few simple techniques to increase your research visibility.

1. Submit articles to institutional repositories

Research output dissemination gets easier with institutional repositories. Nowadays, publishers allow authors to make a version (based on various Open Access policies) of their manuscripts freely accessible in the repository of the institution they are affiliated with.

Check out Elsevier's sharing and hosting policies:

With this, you are essentially opening up articles that may otherwise be locked behind paywalls. As a result, they will soon rank on Google and other search engines for relevant keywords, improving your research visibility quickly. Studies even suggest that papers that are opened in full text in repositories enjoyed a 22-44% increase in citation count.

The caveats here are that the repository solution must support copyright detection and search-optimized indexing. Typeset University Suite checks both these boxes and more.

2. Ensure that authors have a digital identifier

Gauging research visibility is not easy when you cannot accurately track your output. Creating a digital identifier number that permanently links you to your work solves the problem to a large extent. It eliminates ambiguity created by similar names.

Since the author's number is embedded during manuscript submission, citations across platforms can be tracked and claimed easily. It also acts as a record of the researcher's productivity, allowing funders, potential collaborators, and institutions to get insights into their experience.

Two of the most popular digital identifiers currently are ORCiD and ResearcherID .

3. Make research materials publicly available

The opportunities to gain citations don't end with the article PDF. You can make data sets, lines of code, and other documents publicly available too. Platforms such as Figshare or Zenodo let you do this safely and securely regardless of size or format.

The best part is that it automatically assigns a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number to these artifacts. This ensures that you receive credit when another scholar uses it as part of their research or cites it.

4. Contribute to Open Access journals

As we mentioned earlier, Open Access articles are more likely to be cited than those behind a paywall. So, when you are identifying potential journals, give more emphasis to journals that support Open Access publishing.

Open Access journals typically charge authors a specific fee for submissions. This fee may stop some faculty and researchers from opting for OA publications. To avoid this situation, the institution can set up a dedicated OA publishing fund and bear the expenses on behalf of the researchers and faculty.

While it could be seen as an additional expenditure, OA journals are freely accessible, and it costs very little for the university library to stock them.

Check out this eBook on Open Access Publishing to learn how it helps improve your research visibility.

5. Distribute key insights online

If you want to improve your research visibility, sharing critical insights must be at the top of the agenda. It allows you to reach a wider audience asynchronously. You can showcase your expertise, spark conversations about your research, and engage with people from anywhere, anytime.

Because the internet is such a multi-dimensional platform, the possibilities are endless. For example, check out how Queen's University, Belfast used Flickr to promote its special collections let you do this safely and securely regardless of size or format.

Similarly, here's a list of things you can do:

• Launch a blog or even a YouTube channel where you share personal notes on your research, key findings, and behind-the-scenes stories.
• Share your research highlights on different social media websites, including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
• Answer questions or participate in discussions relevant to your article on social media.
• Participate in AMA sessions on Reddit and other social media platforms.
• Feature as an expert guest on podcasts and webinars related to your topic.
• Build an email list featuring interested researchers, university colleagues, and subject matter experts and share critical insights with them.
• Convert critical insights from your study into infographics and upload them to Pinterest and Slideshare.

Remember to license your work using Creative Commons licenses. This way, interested readers will be encouraged to re-use your content.

Apart from this, create profiles on scholarly platforms like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley. You can share articles under the section' work experience'. Then, you can also answer relevant questions from their QnA forums.

6. Level up your ASEO game

One of the common reasons why some publications don't rank is that they are not optimized for search engines. Everything matters, from the article title to the repository where it is archived. It might feel overwhelming, but it is well worth the effort.

Here are a few ASEO tips to keep in mind:

• Try to include the primary keyword at the beginning of the title or within the first 60-70 characters.
• The paper's abstract should be equipped with the search intent term about 3-5 times and should be placed in the first two sentences of the content.
• Incorporate keywords right from the title of the article to the conclusion.
• Use long-tail keywords or phrases instead of stuffing the same keyword; it looks more contextual and helps flow the text without flaws.
• Incorporate meaningful and discipline-specific or niche-based keywords and avoid vague or indefinite terms.
• Use thesauri or discipline-specific thesauri to find the right keywords subjecting your niche.
• Search engines don't encourage over-optimized content unnecessarily stuffed with keywords.

You can check out this ASEO guide to gain a deep understanding of the topic.

Wrapping up

Improving research visibility requires a conscious and collaborative effort. Researchers and scholarly communication professionals need to come together and chart a path forward. Since both universities and authors stand to gain from the activity, both parties must work together.

🔊 Now it's easier than ever to streamline your research workflow with SciSpace . Its integrated, comprehensive end-to-end platform for research allows scholars to easily discover, write and publish their research and fosters collaboration.

SciSpace provides researchers, universities, and publishers with all the tools they need. There are over 200 million research papers in our research repository across multiple disciplines with search engine optimized abstracts, a publicly visible profile that highlights your expertise, and much more.

Before you go,

You might also like.

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Beyond Google Scholar: Why SciSpace is the best alternative

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Memorial University Libraries

Research visibility: introduction.

• Introduction
• Selecting a Journal
• Predatory Publishers
• Promoting Your Work
• Researcher Profiles
• Author-Level Metrics
• Journal-Level Metrics
• Article-Level Metrics & Altmetrics

Research Visibility: Why and How

Increasing the visibility of your research may lead to your work having a greater impact both within and outside academia.

The following are some of the steps you can take to increase the visibility of your research.

Make your work (and related data sets) open access

• Work that is open (rather than behind a paywall) can be read by more people, and may receive more citations ( Piowar et al., 2018 ; Tennant, 2019 ; Colavizza et al., 2019 ; Langham-Putrow et al., 2021 )
• Learn more about open access and open data .

Set up and maintain researcher profiles 

• Make sure you're findable when someone searches your name, and make sure what they find is an accurate record of your work.
• Learn more about researcher profiles (ORCID, Google Scholar, Scopus Author ID, ResearcherID, Yaffle)

Create a web presence (maybe even a blog)

• Having a website (whether your own or through Memorial ) is another way to make sure you're findable on the web. Beyond a traditional list of journal articles, you can share a bio, works-in-progress, resources, etc. If you add a blog you can share your thoughts and solicit feedback on topics you're thinking about in a less formal tone than in a scholarly publication.

Be active on social media

• Twitter in particular can help to connect you with a broader audience for your research.
• Learn more about best practices for social media .

Be available for media requests

• Do you have an interesting story to tell about your research? Connect with Memorial's Marketing and Communications staff to help get the word out.

Write for The Conversation

• Memorial is a member of The Conversation , which is "an independent source of news and views, from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public." The Conversation has a global audience and allows articles to be republished for free , which makes it another great way to share your research.
• Learn more about writing for The Conversation .
• Next: Selecting a Journal >>
• Last Updated: Jul 28, 2022 10:50 AM
• URL: https://guides.library.mun.ca/researchvisibility

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• Published: 03 June 2021

Perspectives on disparities in scientific visibility

• Tejal A. Desai   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3409-9208 1 , 2 ,
• Omolola Eniola-Adefeso 3 ,
• Kelly R. Stevens 4 ,
• Maribel Vazquez   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6184-3103 5 &
• Princess Imoukhuede   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4257-1085 6  

Nature Reviews Materials volume  6 ,  pages 556–559 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Scientific visibility is key to an academic career and rooted in the traditional academic cycle of training, (informal) connections, support, publications, citations, recognition and funding — a cycle from which under-represented groups are often excluded. In this Viewpoint, five scientists discuss experiences and thoughts about disparities in scientific visibility and provide action points.

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Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA

• Tejal A. Desai

Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Departments of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Macromolecular Sciences, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Omolola Eniola-Adefeso

Departments of Bioengineering and Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Kelly R. Stevens

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Maribel Vazquez

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

Princess Imoukhuede

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Contributions

Omolola Eniola-Adefeso is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Macromolecular Sciences at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Tejal A. Desai is the Ernest L Prien Endowed Chair and Deborah Cowan Endowed Professor of the Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and Professor in Residence, Department of Bioengineering, UC Berkeley.

Kelly R. Stevens is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Washington.

Maribel Vazquez is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

Princess Imoukhuede is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of Diversity Initiatives for the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Tejal A. Desai , Omolola Eniola-Adefeso , Kelly R. Stevens , Maribel Vazquez or Princess Imoukhuede .

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Joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing by the Royal Society of Chemistry: https://www.rsc.org/new-perspectives/talent/joint-commitment-for-action-inclusion-and-diversity-in-publishing/

National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE workshop: https://cnx.org/exports/[email protected]/2009-nsf-advance-workshop-negotiating-the-ideal-faculty-position-1.1.pdf

NSF Minority Faculty Development Workshops (MFDW): https://www.facultyequity.com/workshops

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Desai, T.A., Eniola-Adefeso, O., Stevens, K.R. et al. Perspectives on disparities in scientific visibility. Nat Rev Mater 6 , 556–559 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-021-00329-5

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Massachusetts Biotechnology Council

MassBio News

How to increase visibility for your researchers & your science.

Sep 09, 2020

Guest Blog by Jessica Drislane, CEO of OpenScholar

How do you propel science forward in between discoveries? Or when the lab is closed? How about when researchers are remote?

You become your own research publishing platform.

This accomplishes three things:

• It makes your people, programs and projects more visible
• It brings teams together to collaborate
• It attracts talent and grant funding

Harvard is a great example. Ten years ago, they built websites department by department. Departments used different software, agencies, processes, and budgets to achieve their goals. The result was thousands of disconnected websites with different branding, missing research, and dollars wasted.

Harvard wanted a more efficient, unified approach . Unsatisfied with the options available, they created an open publishing platform that allowed every researcher, department, and team to tell their unique stories. Anyone at Harvard, from graduate student to tenured faculty to labs to departments to special projects, can create a website with a click of a button. On it, they publish important research, publications, stories, and collaborations. Researchers take pride in sharing their work publicly while feeling in control of their content.

This inclusive, scalable approach has resulted in the Harvard Stem Cell Institute website and more than 12,000 connected Harvard sites that contain 130,000 publications and attract over 7 million pageviews a month. The network of powerful websites continually strengthens Harvard’s research brand, attracting press, funding, and talent.

What can other research institutions learn from this? Innovative teams at the Broad Institute and more are following this playbook. The same opportunity exists for other fast-moving and forward-thinking biotech, pharma, and medical research firms.

If you’re asking these questions, you have this opportunity too.

• Is research transparency and visibility important to us?
• Does our website showcase our diversity and unique voices?
• Do all of our groups have sites with the latest branding and discoveries?
• Is there an opportunity to better connect researchers to collaborate?

If you haven’t thought about them recently, now is the time.

With the world looking to science to find a COVID-19 vaccine, eyes are on all of us in the scientific community to clearly communicate our purpose, research focus, and progress. In fact, KPMG recently found that 79% of CEOs feel a stronger emotional connection to their corporate purpose since the COVID-19 crisis began.

To take action, start by doing a quick audit of these three areas.

First, are important people, labs, and publications missing from your website? Drop them into a spreadsheet or folder, one central place to have ready.

Second, have visits increased to your site in the past six months? What’s driving the traffic? Has there been a shift on who is visiting – future employees, donors, patients, partners? Know who you want to prioritize talking to for the next six months.

Last, is there a fast and easy path to scale your website to your aspirations? Bring together the research units, marketing and IT teams to understand the timelines and approvals involved in updating your website. Identify any friction points in this process.

Don’t wait for a special moment to level up. You don’t need to commit to a website rebrand, technology change or digital acceleration project to bring your best content online.

Start with your people and labs, the front lines making a real difference to society. Using branded website templates, you can bring hundreds of researcher profile pages and lab microsites online fast. It builds your brand, boosts SEO and increases connections across the company.

At OpenScholar , we are hosting a webinar exclusively for the MassBio community on Turning Your Research Into Impact. OpenScholar’s founder Gary King and CEO Jess Drislane will discuss how to connect your researchers, labs, and discoveries in a single platform that drives visibility for your cutting-edge science. Learn how to transform your website strategy to drive:

• Trust + transparency in your science
• Grants + donations
• Talent acquisition + retention
• Internal, external + cross-disciplinary collaboration

We hope you can join us on October 1, 2020 at 1pm ET. Register for the Webinar .

About the Author:

Jessica Drislane CEO, OpenScholar

Jessica spent 20 years in private equity as a direct investor in technology companies. She worked for Advent International, Capital Resource Partners, Audax Group and Harvard Management Company. She also managed a fund for BNY Mellon for 4 years, where she was the Director of Hedge Fund Strategies. She was most recently the head of strategy at the eCommerce company, Invaluable, where her role entailed identifying revenue opportunities that mapped to the core technology and operational capabilities of that business.

As Director of Strategy of the OpenScholar project at Harvard, Jess was instrumental in lifting the project out of Harvard and convincing the founding team to join her in privatizing OpenScholar as an LLC, a first in Harvard’s 375 year history.

Jess has a BA from Colby College, an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and a post-bacc degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. In her spare time she runs, reads, practices yoga, plays racquet sports and is on the board of overseers of the Peabody Essex Museum.

See all MassBio News

Research Assessment

Researchers and their research are assessed in many different ways: for jobs, promotions, funding and national research assessments. Researchers may also be naturally curious about the attention and impact that their research is having. This page introduces you to some research assessment tools and support available to you at Loughborough.

Responsible use of metrics

Loughborough University has a Responsible Metrics Policy and all use of bibliometrics by University staff should adhere to this.

Narrative CVs

Funders are increasingly requesting applicants to submit a narrative CV instead of a traditional CV in their funding applications. Narrative CVs require researchers to describe not just what they did but how they did it. They seek evidence of a wider range of contributions, skills and experiences than traditional approaches. They also make space for researchers to describe the effects on their CV of any career gaps or periods in industry. 

UKRI now require funding applicants to complete a  Resumé for Research & Innovation  and have provided some guidance on how to complete one. The University of Glasgow have also produce a free Online Course which might be helpful. 

Citation indicators and alt-metrics

Citations are used as an indicator of research impact by league tables, funders and increasingly, employers. Whilst controversial and imperfect, they are here to stay and it is important that individuals know how to improve the visibility and impact of their research. A  5-minute video introduction to citations  is available. There are a wide range of indicators that all calculate citation impact in slightly different ways.

• Harzing.com  has a list of key of metrics relating to individuals
• Journal Metrics  has a list of three key metrics relating to journals
• See this  video on how the SNIP and SJR are calculated .

Loughborough University subscribes to  SciVal  a citation benchmarking tool which allows you to analyse and compare the publication and citation performance of individuals, groups, research areas, organisations and countries. You can also identify collaborators and research strengths based on citation data. 

Loughborough have produced some step-by-step guides to using SciVal as follows:

• Checking your SciVal profile
• Finding your publication record on SciVal
• Finding collaborators using SciVal
• Using SciVal to support grant applications

Alt-metrics measure the “attention” given to your research via such social media networks. This may include ‘likes’, ‘tweets’, downloads, mentions and records within reference managers. There are two main sources of alt-metric data:

• Altmetric.com provides a range of freely available attention indicators as well as offering a premium service to subscribers.  They use a 'donut' logo and provide alt-metric scores based on the attention an output has received. Loughborough staff can find alt-metric donuts on LUPIN and via the Dimensions database.
• Elsevier provide attention indicators through Plum Analytics - a part of the Scopus database Loughborough subscribes to.

These metrics are becoming increasingly important so it is worth making your research as accessible and visible as possible, and think about how it may be perceived by audiences. See this  blog post  on making sure your work gets the attention it deserves.

Increasingly, citation metrics and alt-metrics are being used to support grant applications to demonstrate the impact and reach of your research. See this useful blog post on " 23 diverse metrics to use on your next grant application ".

Improving the citedness of your research

There are a wide range of ways you can improve the visibility and therefore the citedness of your research. A journal paper by Ebrahim et al (2013) identifies  33 ways to improve your citation frequency .

Some top tips include:

• Do world-leading research that is original, significant and rigorous.
• Collaborate with highly-cited, preferably international, co-authors.
• Publish in the most visible journal or conference, or with a publisher with significant marketing reach.
• Publish open access where possible.
• Promote your work through  academic networking sites .
• Add links to your work in your email signature.
• Take hard copies of your papers and circulate at conferences.
• Write keywords, titles and abstracts for search engine optimisation
• Choose a good article title
• Write a long abstract to improve visibility.
• Judicious self-citation  may kick-start interest in your work. Do not over self-cite!
• Promoting your research
• Responsible use of research metrics
• Publishing your research

Research Policy & Planning

• +44 (0)1509 228596

Library Research Support

Practices for enhancing research visibility, citations and impact: review of literature

Aslib Journal of Information Management

ISSN : 2050-3806

Article publication date: 29 November 2023

Issue publication date: 29 November 2023

Majhi, S. , Sahu, L. and Behera, K. (2023), "Practices for enhancing research visibility, citations and impact: review of literature", Aslib Journal of Information Management , Vol. 75 No. 6, pp. 1280-1305. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2023-532

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited

Introduction

Increased research visibility is desired for a variety of reasons by researchers and research departments. It might be as straightforward as wishing to increase the academic influence of their research articles by increasing views and citations. However, others might want to raise their profile in order to attract more prospects for collaboration or even to emphasise the influence of their study on society as a whole. Universities, businesses and governments all over the world have taken notice of the possibilities of more open research. Whatever the objective or goal, it is crucial to share the research work on the appropriate platform for dissemination.

Institutional and subject repositories are excellent locations to make research outputs publicly accessible. Researchers can share their research with the public through a variety of alternative dissemination mechanisms, including Research Gate, Academia.edu and others. One of the best effective techniques to boost a research paper's visibility and number of citations is through open-access (OA) publication, because it makes the study publicly accessible from the very beginning. Researchers can boost their visibility, preserve their work and make it available for use in the future by making all of their outputs publicly accessible. Ogunleye (2019) made a study on “Some determinants of visibility boost for research publications among early career educational researchers in southwest, Nigeria”. In this study, he described that the early career of educational researchers in Southwest Nigeria looked into some determinants (shared reference databases, research profiles, publishing in OA, self-archiving, publication metadata, researcher profiles and social media platforms) for boosting visibility of the publication. A structured questionnaire on factors determining publication boost (r = 0.81) was utilised to collect data, and multiple regression analysis and the Pearson's correlation approach were employed to evaluate the data. A significant positive correlation between each of the following was discovered in the results: joint reference databases (r = 0.17), Publication metadata (r = 0.23), result profiles (r = 0.44), open-access publishing (r = 0.27), self-archiving (r = 0.52), social media networks (r = 0.43) and accessibility of published work are all positively correlated with each other. The six variables had a positive correlation with the publication visibility (R = 0.60), and they were responsible for 32.9% of the gains invisibility of early career researchers' publications. Norman (2012) conducted a research on “Maximizing Journal Article Citation Online: Readers, Robots, and Research Visibility”. Then he explained that online academic publications with peer review provide numerous advantages for researchers. They can enhance an article's popularity and publicity, connect someone's research to the relevant web of existing literature rapidly and add other scholars' attention who will use it, increasing the likelihood of it being used. Also provided five basic areas to make the literature more popular which are choosing a search engine-friendly title, writing of abstracts and introductions, making the article easy to find, using of media and links, dissemination of articles after publication and emphasised on increasing a piece of content's prospects of future downloads, citations and visibility.

Research methodology for review

The search procedure included two phases. Synonymous keywords were found and collated in the first stage. The featured research papers written in English were considered for the study. The only factor used to choose an item for the current evaluation process was its possible relevance. Options for basic and advanced searches were adopted to retrieve the documents. Every research paper with the keyword “research visibility” or similar terms like “research impact,” “Citation,” “tools to enhance research impact” or “papers addressed to enhance research visibility, citation and impact” in the title, keywords or abstract was deemed relevant for the study. Around 135 papers were retrieved using the Web of Science database, which was obtained in September 2022. Out of 40 papers, they were determined to be pertinent for this study, as those papers present usage tools and techniques to enhance the research impact, citation and visibility. Another 19 papers related to the topic were retrieved from the literature review tool “Inciteful” during April 2023. Hence, a total of 59 papers were reviewed.

The researcher had to gone through all the retrieved papers thoroughly to investigate real facts. The papers taken for review were a variety of publications, including journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and book reviews. However, journal papers covered more than 90% of the literature consulted for this review.

Tips for enhancing research visibility, impact and citations

Self-archiving

Self-archiving is the process of depositing an electronic document for free online, so that anybody can access it and that helps to improve accessibility, usage, impact and citation of research work. Through institutional or other repositories, manuscripts must be made accessible to the public, such as ArXiv ( https://arxiv.org/ ), SSRN ( https://www.ssrn.com/ ), ZENODO, n.d ( https://zenodo.org/) and Figshare, n.d. ( https://figshare.com/ ), etc. Supplementary files such as data, extra figures, presentations, tables and reports can be made available too.

According to Ertürk and Şengül (2012) keeping the findings of scientific research on scholars' individual webpages, business websites or institutional repository (IR) is a technique referred to as self-archiving. Making someone's academic work accessible on open-access websites is known as self-archiving. Hence, sharing your research public through open-access platforms boost citations and guarantee greater impact. Lupton (2013) mentioned that benefit of self-archiving content is that it can be found by a larger audience with a quick Google search. Self-archiving is frequently described as the “green way” to OA; this method allows for the free public distribution of full-text articles. As a result, researchers can provide readers with access to their scholarly articles by making them freely accessible (Bradley, 2017). Researchers can use this to submit their paper's pre- or post-print version to self-archiving systems. Pre-prints are scientific papers that have not yet undergone peer assessment, and the peer-reviewed, authorised version for publication is considered a post-print; both can be self-archived.

According to a guideline that Research Councils UK (RCUK) has stated, all scientific articles that have been funded by grant organisations associated with RCUK shall be made publicly available within six months of publication as of April 2013.

All papers funded by public organisations like the US National Institutes of Health are required to be stored in PubMed for free access after being accepted for publication.

Ale Ebrahim et al. (2014) in their research “Visibility and Citation Impact” looks into the connection between an article's visibility and its citation count and recommended for self-archiving publications that would greatly improve the citations. Additionally, their study aims to ascertain the impact of paper exposure on the number of citations received by two distinct academics from various institutions and academic fields. After that, they found that the visibility and citation effect of the publications increased significantly as a result of self-archiving.

Okeji et al . (2018) discovered that some instances of self-archiving sites are Academia.edu , ResearchGate and IRs that academic librarians in Nigerian institutions are aware of and utilise, while academic librarians rarely utilise private websites/servers, Mendeley.com , Kudos and other supported tools.

A study by Shehata et al. (2015) stated that sharing research after it has been published is a good idea since it will make it more visible and easier for people to obtain their papers, which will enhance the likelihood that their work will be cited in more publications. According to Smith (2013) , 84% of the authors believed that there is still more to be done to enhance their work's efficiency, visibility and impact. Unfortunately, a lot of researchers do not share or disseminate their work after it has been peer reviewed. In most cases, they are unaware of the advantages or do not know how to disseminate their research through informal networks.

Only 15–25% of the 2.5 million articles that are produced each year throughout the world are self-archived by the writers ( Hajjem et al ., 2005a , b ; Björk et al ., 2010 ; Gargouri et al ., 2010 ). Around 95% of researchers in two international, multidisciplinary surveys stated that they would self-archive if it is mandatory to do at their institutions or funders; 81% stated that they would deposit willingly if it was required and 14% stated that they would deposit unwillingly ( Swan, 2006 ).

Cerejo (2013) mentioned following interesting facts about self-archiving.

Lack of awareness of its benefits: Many writers are not aware that self-archiving is an option or that it has benefits. Because of this, even whilst the authors' universities have repositories, writers rarely bother with self-archiving until their institutions require it. Self-archived materials' content is a source of concern. In several academic fields, including computer science, pre-prints are stored far more often than post-prints. The research might be evaluated by the larger scientific community before being peer-reviewed.

The majority of journals make their copyright policies on self-archiving clear in their instructions for authors; thus, there is rarely a need to be concerned about breaking them. If authors read and grasp these guidelines, the majority of which permit authors to self-archive, they don't face the danger of breaching any agreements.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) of The University of Southampton was the first organisation in the world to explicitly mandate self-archiving in 2002. Since then, an increasing number of divisions, faculties and organisations from around the globe, including Stanford, Harvard and MIT, as well as research funding organisations like all seven Research Funding Councils of UK, European Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health have also adopted OA self-archiving mandates. As of summer 2010, the Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) already had over 160 mandates enacted, registered and charted ( Gargouri et al ., 2010 ).

Various platforms shown in Table 1 for self-archiving provide ways for researchers to exchange and save their work. Institutional and disciplinary repositories mentioned in Table 1 are the most common self-archiving platforms. Researchers may promote global information sharing by using these platforms to boost awareness, encourage cooperation and adhere to open-access regulations.

Social media platforms

Social media platforms are becoming an essential component of every marketing plan. They are also amongst the best resources to increase research visibility, drive web traffic and interact with audience. Although being visible on social media is one of the essential ways for getting more popularity and gaining citation and visibility, social media platforms like Research Gate, Academia.edu , cite-u-like, Facebook and YouTube can enhance the research impact. Mazurek et al. (2020) explained that the citations are currently regarded as one of the fundamental instruments for evaluating academic performance – an indicator of academic performance is research. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and ResearchGate are utilised for many objectives, and the social media presence of the researcher on all systems that have been evaluated is related to the level of academic success and number of citations. Researchers may boost the number of citations they receive with the effectiveness of social media and communication. Giglia (2011 ) discussed successful instances of academic social networks that have altered to look for, access and distribution of the scientific work. It also explained the features of ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Mendeley to give openness to scientific work. Similarly, Tripathy et al. (2017 ) explained to make use of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for the sharing of podcasts and many other research outputs like, posters, conference papers, reports, presentations, pre-print copies etc. Again sharing of research data in figshare, Scribd, Zenodo and Slideshare as well as the use of individual blogs and unique author identifiers (ORCID) are examples of current approaches to make research more impactful. Ortega (2015) investigated “Disciplinary differences in the use of academic social networking sites amongst researchers from the Spanish National Research Council”. It was found that amongst four academic social networking sites, i.e. Google Scholar, Mendley, ResearchGate and Academia, the fourth one is heavily populated by social scientists and humanists. Racz and Marković (2018) founded that online communication tools like research sharing (Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Academia.edu and ResearchGate), social networking (Blogs, Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter), by distributing their work through media sharing (Slide Share) and data sharing (PubChem, Mendeley, PubMed and Dryad Digital Repository), writers are able to make their study more visible, accessible and profitable. Mikki et al. (2015) found that 37% of University of Bergen researchers have profiles on at least one academic social networking site, comparing data across five sites. The most frequent frequency was found at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

According to the Van Noorden (2014) , ResearchGate is very popular. In that study, more than 88 engineers claimed to be aware of it, compared to 29% of scientists who claimed to be aware of Academia.edu but only 5% of who visited frequently. Around 8% of scientists in the poll often visited Mendeley, and 48% were aware of it. Muscanell and Utz (2017) found that ResearchGate is the more popular one. Researchers would be more productive if they had access to publications and tools for collaboration and asking questions.

The web-based Research Information Management (RIM) service known as IRINS is provided by the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) Centre. By gathering, curating and promoting scholarly communication activities, the portal gives faculty members, scientists, R&D groups and academic institutions the opportunity to establish a scholarly network. The IRINS is available to Indian academic and R&D groups for free as software-as-a-service. The IRINS would facilitate the integration of the current research management systems, including the human resources system, course management system, grant management system, IR, free and subscription-based citation databases, academic publishers, etc. For consuming the scientific publication from, it has integrated with academic identities including ORCID ID, Scopus ID, Microsoft Academic ID, Google Scholar ID, etc. from various sources.

According to Netravati et al. (2010 ), today, the majority of research publications are available via OA via numerous channels. The data might be efficiently made apparent through the use of IRINS, which also aids in measuring the research output of institutions. The INFLIBNET centre takes a lot of action. One of these is the 2002 formation of the VIDWAN expert database and National Researcher Network, which served as the impetus for the creation of the IRINS in 2017 as part of the National Mission on Education through ICT.

Examples of popular social academic platforms

Academia.edu

ResearchGate

In order to significantly accelerate the growth and spread of knowledge, Penprofile, a social networking tool for academicians, encourages connections amongst academics/scholars, students and educational institutions on a global scale. It is accessible to everyone and offers a variety of beneficial tools for productivity and networking.

Google Scholar

Primarily, Scribd is an online library. It is an American e-book and audiobook subscription service that provides a single location for e-books, audiobooks, podcasts, periodicals, news articles, sheet music, papers and more ( https://www.scribd.com/ ). It is also a social networking site where academicians will find a variety of resources for their research.

Open access

Unrestricted use of electronic resources and OA to information is referred to as “open access”. OA is permitted for any kind of digital content, image, text, data, software, audio, video and multimedia. In 2001, Lawrence discovered that publications in computer science that were freely available online received a lot more citations than those that weren't. OA literature is defined by Peter Suber (2004) as being digital, online, cost-free and free of the majority of copyright and licencing restrictions. Lynch (2006) makes a similar point, describing OA as a greater removal of obstacles to the use of scientific material by anyone interested in doing so. In order to get “the best value” and make the results of publicly financed research transparent and freely available, the OA movement seeks to re-establish control over it, as illustrated by McCulloch (2006) . Although the majority of studies have found that OA papers receive more citations than non-OA (NOA) articles in the majority of fields, the origin of this so-called OA citation advantage (OACA) has been the topic of discussion ( Craig et al ., 2007 ). When OA and NOA publications from the same journal and year are compared, OA articles regularly receive higher citations, with the advantage depending by discipline and year from 36 to 172%. The annual percentage of OA articles is growing significantly faster than NOA within every citation range when comparing articles within six citation ranges (0, 1, 2–3, 4–7, 8–15 and 16+ citations) (r > 0.90, N = 12 and p 0.0005), and the effect is greater with the more highly cited articles (r = 0.98, N = 6 and p 0.005). Although causality cannot be inferred from these data, it is unlikely that the OA citation advantage is merely or mostly a self-selection bias (for making only one's better articles OA), given that we previously discovered a similar pattern in physics where the per cent of OA is much higher (and even approaches 100% in some subfields). In addition to the direct impact advantages, when the OA database nears 100%, a wealth of additional rich indicators of research usage and impact, such as both citation and download counts, growth curves and latencies, will become possible. Numerous online performance measures include semantic indices, hub/authority ranks, co-citation counts and others ( Chawki Hajjem et al , 2005a , b ). It was initially noted in 2001 that publicly accessible online scientific proceedings earned more than three times as many citations as print journals on average. OA publications could reach more readers than subscription-based publications. There is no evidence to support the claim that OA publications get higher citations in the first year following publication. The OA citation advantage that has been extensively studied in the literature may have been influenced by additional factors ( Philip M Davis et al , 2008 ).

Gold OA: The first is known as gold OA and entails publishing books or articles on a publisher's platform utilising an OA strategy. The second is known as green OA and involves archiving copy of the work in an OA repository. Christian Gumpenberger et al. (2013) claim that gold OA (=OA publication) is frequently chosen by those who want instant, unrestricted access to research output. Little is known about the likelihood that OA may benefit an article not just in terms of the overall number of citations it receives but also in terms of the nature and audience of those citations. Interdisciplinary is a characteristic that OA might undoubtedly affect. Interdisciplinary research is currently a hot topic in cutting-edge science. There is some proof that multidisciplinary research gets more high-quality citations.

( Chen et al ., 2015 ). According to Zhang and Watson (2017) , using data from the Web of Science, the majority of the papers published between 2008 and 2015 were not freely accessible, although 9% were available through gold OA pathways and 13% were available through green routes. The OA journals with manuscript processing fees had the highest citation rates for gold OA publications. Readers may view all gold OA papers for free as soon as they are published.

Green OA: Content published through the gold OA route is available right away, whereas manuscripts deposited through the green OA route may only be available once a self-archiving embargo period is completed. Depending on the licence under which it was made public, the conditions for further sharing and reusing OA content will vary.

According to Young and Brandes (2020a , b) this dataset includes 2105 items in total, spanning the years 2007–2019. There are 162 papers published each year on average, with a median normalised times cited per year of 0.16 and average integration scores of 0.56, 0.42 and 0.42, respectively. This journal's impact factor for 2017 is 0.976 according to the Journal Citation Reports. The investigation discovered that the citation rates were substantially greater when simply taking into account the green OA. Green OA papers have a higher multidisciplinary impact score than NOA publications. Lawrence (2001) wrote one of the earliest publications to look at the impact of research papers being available for free online. The author found that “an average of 336% more citations to online computer science articles compared with offline articles published in the same venue” (Lawrence, 2001). Since then, a number of studies that determine an “OA Citation Advantage,” also known as OACA, have been published. Although several research have looked at whether OA publishing (either gold or green) generates more citations, there are few that have specifically compared the citation counts of gold OA and green OA. Green OA publications received 53% more citations on average than the average of all the papers in the study, according to research done by Archambault et al. between 1996 and 2013 on the different categories of OA papers at the European and global levels ( Archambault et al. , 2014 ). Articles in green OA repositories receive 50% more citations than those behind a paywall (Pablo Dorta- González et al. , 2022 ).

As more people download publications, there are more citations of those articles, which increase the exposure of academic work ( Swan 2006 ). Green OA essentially works to minimise expenses and related hazards whilst enabling access to the research literature. For colleges that aim to offer unfettered access to all literature at the lowest possible risk, green OA is the most affordable and advantageous alternative ( Suzanne Fredericks RN, 2015 ). In a recent study of 1.3 million ISI-indexed journal articles published in 10 scientific fields between 1992 and 2003, it was discovered that publications that were accessible in full text via a web-crawling robot earned, on average, 83% more citations than those that could not be retrieved freely ( Bo-Christer Björk, 2006 ).

Hybrid OA: Hybrid OA (HOA) is a paid publication with partial OA content. For an item to be published OA under this status, the publisher usually has to pay a publishing fee in addition to the ongoing subscription fees for all other content. Papers undergo the same peer-review process after submission. The author has the choice to employ the OA option after being accepted or not. The author must pay the HOA cost, which is normally around $3,000, if the author opts for HOA. The author keeps the copyright in return. the author has the right to publish the article's final version in IRs without an embargo period as well as to post it for free online so that anybody may download it for free ( Frank Mueller-Langer and Richard Watt, 2014 ).

The OA and closed-access economics articles published in the same hybrid journals were compared by Mueller-Langer and Watt (2014) . The information utilised in their analysis came from a HOA Pilot Agreement, which reduced self-selection/quality bias by automatically publishing publications by authors from the participating universities as OA in the piloting hybrid journals. The citation rate was found to have grown by 22–26% as a result of HOA. The number of citations for open publications published in hybrid journals was far higher than for OA journals, according to our research. As a result, papers using the hybrid gold modality receive twice as many citations as those using the gold modality. Additionally, using OA repositories significantly boosts the number of citations obtained, especially for those without funding (Pablo Dorta-Gonzalez & María Isabel Dorta-Gonzalez, 2022). Mueller-Langer and Watt (2014) conducted a study on the citation effect of HOA amongst articles published in 15 economics journals offering an HOA option. The authors included 14 journals from Springer and 1 from Oxford University press, with a total of 1329 articles published from December 2006 to December 2011. Based on manual identification 208 articles were found to be available HOA. HOA shares of articles published in the 15 journals ranged from 3.02 to 18.06%, with a total HOA share of 6.5% for all included articles. Major scholarly publishers have in recent years started providing the hybrid option for the vast majority of their journals. The number of journals offering the hybrid option has increased from around 2,000 in 2009 to almost 10,000 in 2016. The number of individual articles has in the same period grown from an estimated 8,000 in 2009 to 45,000 in 2016 ( Bo-Christer Björk, 2017 ).

OA studies increase citation rate: In the field of information science and bibliometrics, Internet accessibility is one of the most crucial factors that will boost the research's citations, page views, downloads (use) and media attention. Thus, it is claimed that subscription-based access is less likely to result in article downloads than OA publications ( Miguel et al ., 2011 ).

OA gives more visibility and citation to enhance the research. Racz and Marković (2018 ) suggested that OA articles received more number of citations compared to subscription-based articles. Therefore, the OA to the resources and online communication tools helps the researcher to get greater audience. Rao (2021 ) Emphasised that scientific publications are crucial for researchers to publish their own research effort as well as learn about the earlier study in a field. The reader can learn more about an author's work and get free access to research, which also helps the researcher and publisher to increase the visibility of their work.

OA papers are simpler to find, read and cite (OA hypothesis);

OA publications typically become cited sooner than pay-for-access articles since they are made available online before being published (early-view hypothesis) and

More well-known writers are more likely to offer OA to their works, and authors are more inclined to offer OA to their best works (selection-bias hypothesis).

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a 16-digit persistent digital identity that separates any researcher from all other researchers. Similar to how books and scholarly journals are tracked with ISBNs and digital object identifiers, publishers, authors and institutions may use this digital identity to simply recognise all scholars and researchers worldwide. It will enhance the research impact, citation and visibility of a researcher. Brown et al. (2016) make a study on “Open Access in Context: Connecting Authors, Publications and Workflows Using ORCID Identifiers”. In that paper, they talk about the 2012-created ORCID and the problem of name ambiguity. In order to get over the challenges of distinguishing the outputs of certain academics, the ORCID identifier was created to give the academic community a unique register to save their records and data, both manually and by automatically connecting with other data sources. Similarly, Shah (2020) in his study “The ORCID, why we need yet another ID?” explained that ORCID increases work's recognition and discoverability and it is free. The ORCID works across disciplines, institutions and the entire world, in contrast to other identifiers which may be restricted to an organisation, discipline, geographic location or proprietary system. It facilitates connections between various datasets and serves as a hub for managing and sharing research findings amongst academics, publishers, funders and employers. Also, it is a researcher-driven system that enables researchers to use their ORCID identity in a variety of platforms and services. Gireesh Kumar and Muruli, 2017 in their study “RESEARCHER IDENTIFIERS AND PROFILES: COMMUNITY STANDARD NETWORKS TO ENHANCE GLOBAL COLLABORATION” mentioned the benefits of popular researcher identities and profiles and suggests the optimal one. The scholarly community had considered ORCID to be the most effective unique researcher identity, and it is widely used in many nations as a well-recognised tool. They also described the state of scholarly community in higher education regarding knowledge, use and the use of researcher profiles for various tools in relation to the Central University of Kerala's faculties. It emphasised the creation of research profiles to enhance research impact, citations and visibility. Shah (2022) explained that the personal profile of a researcher facilitates communication and raises awareness of scholarly work. Online profiles significantly improve communication and involvement with the academic community also Academic Social Networking help the researcher to boost the research impact. Tripathy et al. (2017) made a study on “Ten tips to improve the visibility and dissemination of research for policy makers and practitioners” to analyse tips to improve the visibility and dissemination of research. They said there are many ways to increase research visibility such as expand the co-authorship 15 base, select the title and keywords wisely, make the articles OA, effective use of online social media, create and share podcasts, sharing research outputs other than the manuscript, create a personal blog, get a unique author identifier ORCID to distinguish yourself and your work from other researchers, etc. They also analysed that the researchers have more opportunities to share their research articles with the emergence of IRs and scholarly social media platforms such as Academia.edu and Research Gate.

Jain, Sanjeev Kumar and Makwana, Dr Jignesh in their research “Author and Researcher Identifier Services: A case of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)” mentioned that researchers will be recognised for their contributions, save time and hassle and reduce the potential of errors by sharing their data with other systems using their ORCID. They also discuss about ORCID Membership Base. They found there are more than 1,200 organisations that are direct and indirect members of ORCID, including universities and research institutions (77.28), content providers (7.33), professional societies (4.20), non-profit entities (4.03), infrastructure, government entities (3.79), service providers, private enterprises and other participants (0.33) in the research ecosystem, are members of the ORCID initiative. As of 2 August 2022, ORCID declared 14,727 479 active accounts and 1258 member organisations are registered in ORCID ( https://en.wikipedia.org ). The ORCID work flow is depicted in the following diagram.

Disciplinary repository and institutional repository

A discipline repository, also known as a subject repository, is an archive in online mode that houses academics' works and the data that go with them. Scholars from any institution can submit their work to disciplinary repositories. According to Rebecca Reznik-Zellen and Adamick (2012) , “disciplinary repositories that incorporate community building tools into their standard services of information collection, hosting, and dissemination might serve as social networks for existing or emerging disciplines. It can integrate social networking components to act as ‘knowledge brokers’ for emerging disciplines of practice.” By archiving research outputs in a particular disciplinary repository, the researcher will get more impact and citations.

The use of research institutions' own repositories for “hosting, archiving, monitoring, measuring, managing, evaluating and showcasing” their researchers' work in order to maximise its adoption, usage and effect has frequently been discussed by academics ( Gargouri et al. , 2010 ).

IRs are archives for compiling, preserving and disseminating digital versions of a company's intellectual output, particularly that of a research institution.

Organ (2006) provided information on download and usage statistics for the Australian University of Wollongong's IR. He talked about how faculty members might boost the impact and number of citations of their research by uploading it to IRs.

He showed how publishing studies in OA databases might increase citations by as much as 500%. IRs are used primarily to boost the scientific and intellectual output of institutions' global visibility, which in turn raises the institution's reputation and stature. When these contents are uploaded in IRs, the web performance of research output in terms of presence, impact, openness and visibility of intellectual contents would be accomplished ( Adewole-odeshi, Egbe &Ezechukwu, OkeomaChinelo, 2020 ).

Many academic institutions have made extensive use of IRs to share and preserve knowledge. Open-source solutions are often chosen by IR proponents due to their natural compliance with the ideology of the freedom and independence of the Internet from commercial concerns. Institutions gain from improved research visibility, the influence of research output, interoperability and other factors brought about by IRs ( Akpokodje, Vera Nkiruka, Akpokodje, Edore Thomas (2015) .

IRs give an institution a way to highlight its intellectual production, centralise and improve efficiency in the management of valuable digital data and proactively address the rising problem in scholarly communication. (Gibbons S. 200, as cited Foster, N.F. & Gibbons S.) Some believe that IRs can boost an institution's reputation or brand by presenting the research accomplishments of its faculty ( Crow, 2002 ).

At the University of Wollongong in Australia, Organ (2006) provided information on download and usage data for the IR. He communicated about how faculty members might boost the impact and number of citations of their research by uploading it to IRs.

He demonstrated how publishing research papers in OA databases could boost citation rates by up to 500%. IRs are used primarily to boost the scientific and intellectual output of institutions' global visibility, which in turn raises the institution's reputation and stature. When these contents are uploaded in IRs, the web performance of research output in terms of presence, impact, openness and visibility of intellectual contents would be accomplished. ( Adewole-odeshi, Egbe &Ezechukwu, OkeomaChinelo, 2020 ).

Many academic institutions have made extensive use of IRs to share and preserve knowledge. Due of their inherent compatibility with the philosophy of the freedom and independence of the Internet from commercial interests, open-source solutions are typically preferred by IR proponents. Institutions gain from improved research visibility, the influence of research output, interoperability and other factors brought about by IRs ( Akpokodje, Vera Nkiruka, Akpokodje, Edore Thomas 2015 ).

IRs give an institution a way to highlight its intellectual production, centralise and improve efficiency in the management of valuable digital data and proactively address the rising problem in scholarly communication ( Foster and Gibbons, 2005 , as cited Foster & Gibbons). Some believe that IRs can boost an institution's reputation or brand by presenting the research accomplishments of its faculty ( Crow, 2002 ).

IRs enable the collection of content in a single area, the capture and OA to an Institution's intellectual production and the preservation of content that might otherwise be unavailable or out of print. It attracts the wider audience of the institution or discipline. IRs are defined by Crow (2002) as digital collections that record and protect the scholarship produced by one or more university communities.

DSpace was created by HP and the MIT library in collaboration. DSpace records, saves, indexes, safeguards and redistributes the forms of an institute's research materials. IRs and electronic records management are supported by DSpace.

E-prints was developed by the University of Southampton as the first programme for a digital repository to manage an open archive. The repository's Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant software was E-Prints. It typically enables pre-prints and collections of technical reports with a specific focus.

FEDORA: Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (FEDORA) was created through a partnership between Cornell University Information Science and the University of Virginia Library. FEDORA is free source, serving as the foundation for several different types of information management systems. It also encourages the creative invention of original tools.

Greenstone: Digital library collections are created and shared using Greenstone. This programme was developed and made available by the UNESCO and University of Waikato's New Zealand Digital Library Project. It was made available as open-source, multilingual software under the GNU General Public License.

CONTENTdm is distributes by OCLC which was created at the University of Washington. The software includes tools for collecting or making collections, for storing content and for displaying and retrieving items.

Digi Tool is a solution for managing digital assets in academic and library settings.

EN Compass is the one of the software for managing and accessing digital content. EN Compass includes a wide range of modules for different uses.

Meta Source is a group of tools for managing digital collections that includes support for metadata schemes, digital object storage and external collection crawling.

According to Zainab (2010) , IRs make papers accessible, improve their chances of being used by other scholars and facilitate the flow of ideas between researchers working in related fields. Tate (2010) discussed the method for raising a paper's visibility is to deposit it in the IR. Increasing the exposure and citation impact of the institution's scholarship is one of the frequently touted advantages of adopting an IR. Ale Ebrahim (2016a , b) explained that the IR can enhance the research visibility. Faculty members and graduate students at universities can store their research outputs on platform like IRs. By lowering barriers to knowledge sharing, submitting papers to OA repositories will boost the article's visibility and citations. Singh et al. (2020) found that for the global visibility, the SAARC countries used IR to enhance the research impact and make it more popular amongst the scholarly communities. According to the findings of the study, out of 128 IRs, 14.06% of them were registered between 2013 and 2019. DSpace (60.94%) and E-Prints (25%) are the two software programmes that are most commonly used to create repositories. In terms of IRs amongst the SAARC nations, India contributes the most (72.66%). Rodríguez and Gallardo (2018) explained how the Institutional Digital Repository (IDR) was built as a plan to increase the academic output of the UFPS-CUCUTA visibility and influence on the national and international levels. By adopting these tactics, the UFPS increased its exposure and the influence of its academic and research production on national and international levels, which advances science ranking on the university's website. The main barriers to developing IRs in African academic institutions, according to Dlamini and Snyman (2017) , include a lack of funding, a lack of managerial support, and a lower level of understanding of IRs. In order to raise the awareness of the research, the study advised African academic institutions to both expand the number of IRs and enhance their utilisation ( Kim, 2011) . In a research of 17 Carnegie doctoral-granting universities in the United States of America, it was discovered that long-term preservation and copyright issues were the academics' motivating reasons for contributing to IRs.

Search Optimisation

Search optimisation is the process of selecting key phrases and putting them in the content of the abstract for search engine optimisation (SEO). Avoiding titles with questions, use of comprehensive title that make use of the prominent words, as well as selecting a journal as publishing venue that included in the most significant library databases pertinent to the research area ( O’ Neill and Curran, 2011 ).

High exposure of an article may be accomplished through SEO techniques and modern methods that can enhance visibility and raise the number of citations. For academics, writing research papers for publication requires a lot of time and effort. A paper's influence on citations is not, however, guaranteed by publishing in a prominent journal with a high impact factor. The chance that a research publication is accessible online and the number of citations are highly correlated. Shahzad et al. (2017) .

The author has to create a personal website or blog where he or she may publish their research contributions, thoughts, ideas and major findings. They can also use this space to promote their research work or to explain how their work has influenced and been useful to others. He or she can publish download links and a list of all of his research articles on a personal website or blog ( Tripathy, J. P. et al , 2017 ). This will raise both the visibility and the number of citations for his or her research works. Unique author identifiers are essential for all research. Each researcher should establish their own author identity in order to set themselves and their work apart from that of other researchers (ORCID) ( Tripathy et al, 2017 ; Shahzad et al, 2017 ).

One of the most crucial variables for assessing a website's search engine rating, popularity and value is the amount of back links it has ( Jones, Kristopher 2018 ). “When a research article links to any website, it is called a back link for the research article” (Chavan et al . 2013).

Hence, the act of creating a back link for a research article is another important method for SEO. Back links, in the opinion of SEO professionals, are crucial for content visibility and a crucial ranking factor for research papers. An article with plenty of hyperlinks has a tendency to rank first on Google as well as other major search engines (Chavan et al, 2013).

The generation of back links for research articles can be done in a variety of ways. This can be accomplished by creating back links through social media. The author can look for pertinent online forums, join discussions, and include a link to his or her research publications as references. Additionally, the author might link to his or her research articles by writing guest pieces for the best research sites. Author can raise visibility of research articles and his research profile by building quality back links in pertinent forums, blogs, and discussion groups ( Shahzad et al., 2017 ; Chavan et al . 2013).

Choose the right keywords and search terms to improve visibility;

Make sure the article's title is optimised for search engines;

Use synonyms, key phrases and keywords whilst creating the abstract;

To avoid ambiguity, get an ORCID and use it when submitting works to publishers;

Use headings for various sections, it will help in structuring the article;

Cite earlier works;

Tables and figures should have machine-readable text and

Make sure the article title contains the primary keyword of the subject.

Also Shahzad et al. (2017) examined how SEO strategies can raise a research paper's visibility. The strategies are the research paper's title optimisation, consistency and density of keywords, the coherence between the author's name and the researcher's website, social contributions made by researchers to Wikipedia and the generation of back links for research articles.

Schilhan et al . (2021) examined the effects of SEO strategies that can raise a research paper's visibility. They discuss some important terms for title optimisation, keyword optimisation and abstract optimisation for scholarly publication. These terms are listed below:

Research data sharing

Research data are the raw materials that are obtained, prepared and reviewed whilst a study is being conducted. They act as the substantiating proof for results of published study. Research data may be found in text, Word and spreadsheet documents, diaries, lab notebooks, forms, audio and video recordings, photographs, movies, test results, slides, artefacts, samples, database contents, workflows and procedures, amongst other things. Sharing of research data helps in getting more visibility and Other researchers can use your data when they are is easily accessible, or they might want to interact with you to expand on the data you have previously shared. Pinho and Diogo (2018) conducted a research on “Enhancing the visibility and impact of scholarly research: an exploratory study on knowledge production settings”. In this study, they explored that the researcher must communicate their research data, findings and spread their products such as articles, patents, etc. on an individual basis to enhance their research impact. The literature on the field makes the case that raising research's visibility is necessary to increase its impact on society and academia alike. In an exploratory study conducted by the authors at two university research centres in Portugal, they discovered some findings in certain responses that many respondents use ResearchGate (28%), ORCID (22%), Google Scholar (21%) and Academia.edu (20%) to deliver their research profile and research data. They also mentioned that participants are sharing their documents, like articles, posters and presentations, in different websites to get more impact and visibility. They discovered that disseminating research and its results can enhance its effect and advancement in the scientific community, where researchers are perceived as belonging or view their scientific contributions. This will simultaneously boost the quantity of citations. Ali and Saeed (2019) conducted a survey amongst researchers and the Aligarh Muslim University's (AMU) teaching fraternity of life sciences and social sciences. In that study, they found many reasons mentioned in following Figure 1 , due to which research scholars in the social sciences are more open to sharing their findings than those in the life sciences. They also identified the different types of research data they are sharing amongst others (experimental measurements, statistical data, laboratory notes, clinical measurements, observations, questionnaires, photographs, films and test responses).

Louise Bezuidenhout and EreckChakauya (2018) carried a study on “Hidden concerns of sharing research data by low/middle income country scientists”. In this study, they were concerned about the issues that encourage data sharing amongst researchers, so they used information from a quantitative survey distributed to life scientists in 13 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. They also studied how the data sharing connected the researchers to the research environment and gained visibility. Increased research impact and visibility were identified as the main motivators for data sharing (55%) by the study. Also, they discovered that many respondents utilised “altmetric” sharing services like Figshare (16%) and the overwhelming majority of responders used peer-review publication (80%), emailed collaborators (80%) and kept active research gate profiles (73%), IR (53%) and online database (58%). Only some respondents mentioned a personal webpage (39%) for data sharing. The responders also noted that networking and cooperation possibilities and the progress of knowledge were the two main advantages of sharing their own data. The researchers also found that 60% respondents mentioned that they felt at ease revealing pre-publication information to others they knew, and 13% of respondents shared pre-publication data with an unknown person.

Suhr et al. (2020) made a research on “Search, reuse and sharing of research data in materials science and engineering—A qualitative interview study”. The researchers who took part in that study were questioned about potential incentives for sharing their research data and found many reasons like encouragement by supervisors, increasing visibility, getting citations, career benefits, facilitation of research, encouragement by funding agency, getting feedback on the work, formation of collaborations, etc. Also Shahzad et al . (2017) in his study “The Impact of Search Engine Optimization on The Visibility of Research Paper and Citations” suggested that the author can upload all these data to public repositories to raise the profile of their research and also post all the slides for better visibility as the research community utilises SlideShare and Scribd regularly. It will increase visibility if research data are published on Figshare, Datadryad and Zenodo etc. According to several studies, the optimal method of distributing data in terms of preservation, openness and authorship acknowledgement (which will help boost SEO) is to submit datasets to data repositories. There were 9% (95% confidence interval: 5%–13%) more citations for data that were made accessible in a public repository than for data that were not, according to 2013 research by Piwowar and Vision on “Data reuse and the open data citation advantage”. Additionally, they claimed that articles employing publicly available datasets received more citations than equivalent research that lacked data.

The ability to be seen these days when other researchers begin their own work is crucial for a universal research scientist. Therefore, in order to promote scientific productions, more data sharing in some channels is necessary.

In conclusion, the review of literature on practices for enhancing research visibility, citations and impact highlights the significance of adopting various strategies to effectively promote research output. It is evident that researchers need to adopt a multifaceted approach that involves a combination of traditional and modern methods to achieve maximum impact. The number of citations will significantly increase whenever a paper's exposure rises. Consequently, a few easy methods can improve an article's prominence. Simply by using particular practices, researchers might improve their reputation and visibility. These practices include publishing in high-impact journals, utilising social media and academic networking sites, creating effective and informative titles, abstracts and keywords and making research accessible and understandable to a broader audience through OA platforms.

The biggest advantages of visibility include getting noticed, enhancing communication and having more in-depth scientific knowledge, as well as improved teamwork, a passion for research and excellence in collaboration and research, as well as higher output, career advancement, an increase in exploratory studies, referencing levels and utilising scholarly journals.

Factors motivating to share research data by courtesy of Ali and Saeed (2019)

Platforms for self-archiving

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Further reading

Aguinis , H. , Yu , L. and Tosun , C. ( 2021 ), “ How to enhance scholarly impact: recommendations for university administrators, researchers and educators ”, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management , Vol. 33 No. 8 , pp. 2485 - 2499 , doi: 10.1108/IJCHM-10-2020-1189 .

Aksnes , D.W. , Langfeldt , L. and Wouters , P. ( 2019 ), “ Citations, citation indicators, and research quality: an overview of basic concepts and theories ”, SAGE Open , Vol. 9 No. 1 , 2158244019829575 , doi: 10.1177/2158244019829575 .

Ale Ebrahim , N. ( 2015 ), Strategies to Enhance Research Visibility, Impact & Citations , doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1404937 .

Anatomy of green open access—Björk—2014—Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology—Wiley Online Library ( n.d. ), available at: https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.22963 ( accessed 25 April 2023 ).

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What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

You’ve read the think pieces. AI—in particular, the generative AI (gen AI) breakthroughs achieved in the past year or so—is poised to revolutionize not just the way we create content but the very makeup of our economies and societies as a whole. But although gen AI tools such as ChatGPT may seem like a great leap forward, in reality they are just a step in the direction of an even greater breakthrough: artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Get to know and directly engage with senior McKinsey experts on AGI

Aamer Baig is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Chicago office; Federico Berruti is a partner in the Toronto office; Ben Ellencweig is a senior partner in the Stamford, Connecticut, office; Damian Lewandowski is a consultant in the Miami office; Roger Roberts is a partner in the Bay Area office, where Lareina Yee is a senior partner;  Alex Singla  is a senior partner in the Chicago office and the global leader of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey;  Kate Smaje  and Alex Sukharevsky  are senior partners in the London office;   Jonathan Tilley is a partner in the Southern California office; and Rodney Zemmel is a senior partner in the New York office.

AGI is AI with capabilities that rival those of a human . While purely theoretical at this stage, someday AGI may replicate human-like cognitive abilities including reasoning, problem solving, perception, learning, and language comprehension. When AI’s abilities are indistinguishable from those of a human, it will have passed what is known as the Turing test , first proposed by 20th-century computer scientist Alan Turing.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. AI has made significant strides in recent years, but no AI tool to date has passed the Turing test. We’re still far from reaching a point where AI tools can understand, communicate, and act with the same nuance and sensitivity of a human—and, critically, understand the meaning behind it. Most researchers and academics believe we are decades away from realizing AGI; a few even predict we won’t see AGI this century (or ever). Rodney Brooks, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and cofounder of iRobot, believes AGI won’t arrive until the year 2300 .

If you’re thinking that AI already seems pretty smart, that’s understandable. We’ve seen gen AI  do remarkable things in recent years, from writing code to composing sonnets in seconds. But there’s a critical difference between AI and AGI. Although the latest gen AI technologies, including ChatGPT, DALL-E, and others, have been hogging headlines, they are essentially prediction machines—albeit very good ones. In other words, they can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, the answer to a specific prompt because they’ve been trained on huge amounts of data. This is impressive, but it’s not at a human level of performance in terms of creativity, logical reasoning, sensory perception, and other capabilities . By contrast, AGI tools could feature cognitive and emotional abilities (like empathy) indistinguishable from those of a human. Depending on your definition of AGI, they might even be capable of consciously grasping the meaning behind what they’re doing.

The timing of AGI’s emergence is uncertain. But when it does arrive—and it likely will at some point—it’s going to be a very big deal for every aspect of our lives, businesses, and societies. Executives can begin working now to better understand the path to machines achieving human-level intelligence and making the transition to a more automated world.

Learn more about QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey .

What is needed for AI to become AGI?

Here are eight capabilities AI needs to master before achieving AGI. Click each card to learn more.

How will people access AGI tools?

Today, most people engage with AI in the same ways they’ve accessed digital power for years: via 2D screens such as laptops, smartphones, and TVs. The future will probably look a lot different. Some of the brightest minds (and biggest budgets) in tech are devoting themselves to figuring out how we’ll access AI (and possibly AGI) in the future. One example you’re likely familiar with is augmented reality and virtual reality headsets , through which users experience an immersive virtual world . Another example would be humans accessing the AI world through implanted neurons in the brain. This might sound like something out of a sci-fi novel, but it’s not. In January 2024, Neuralink implanted a chip in a human brain, with the goal of allowing the human to control a phone or computer purely by thought.

A final mode of interaction with AI seems ripped from sci-fi as well: robots. These can take the form of mechanized limbs connected to humans or machine bases or even programmed humanoid robots.

What is a robot and what types of robots are there?

The simplest definition of a robot is a machine that can perform tasks on its own or with minimal assistance from humans. The most sophisticated robots can also interact with their surroundings.

Programmable robots have been operational since the 1950s. McKinsey estimates that 3.5 million robots are currently in use, with 550,000 more deployed every year. But while programmable robots are more commonplace than ever in the workforce, they have a long way to go before they outnumber their human counterparts. The Republic of Korea, home to the world’s highest density of robots, still employs 100 times as many humans as robots.

Introducing McKinsey Explainers : Direct answers to complex questions

But as hardware and software limitations become increasingly surmountable, companies that manufacture robots are beginning to program units with new AI tools and techniques. These dramatically improve robots’ ability to perform tasks typically handled by humans, including walking, sensing, communicating, and manipulating objects. In May 2023, Sanctuary AI, for example, launched Phoenix, a bipedal humanoid robot that stands 5’ 7” tall, lifts objects weighing as much as 55 pounds, and travels three miles per hour—not to mention it also folds clothes, stocks shelves, and works a register.

As we edge closer to AGI, we can expect increasingly sophisticated AI tools and techniques to be programmed into robots of all kinds. Here are a few categories of robots that are currently operational:

• Stand-alone autonomous industrial robots : Equipped with sensors and computer systems to navigate their surroundings and interact with other machines, these robots are critical components of the modern automated manufacturing industry.
• Collaborative robots : Also known as cobots, these robots are specifically engineered to operate in collaboration with humans in a shared environment. Their primary purpose is to alleviate repetitive or hazardous tasks. These types of robots are already being used in environments such as restaurant kitchens and more.
• Mobile robots : Utilizing wheels as their primary means of movement, mobile robots are commonly used for materials handling in warehouses and factories. The military also uses these machines for various purposes, such as reconnaissance and bomb disposal.
• Human–hybrid robots : These robots have both human and robotic features. This could include a robot with an appearance, movement capabilities, or cognition that resemble those of a human, or a human with a robotic limb or even a brain implant.
• Humanoids or androids : These robots are designed to emulate the appearance, movement, communicative abilities, and emotions of humans while continuously enhancing their cognitive capabilities via deep learning models. In other words, humanoid robots will think like a human, move like a human, and look like a human.

What advances could speed up the development of AGI?

Advances in algorithms, computing, and data  have brought about the recent acceleration of AI. We can get a sense of what the future may hold by looking at these three capabilities:

Algorithmic advances and new robotics approaches . We may need entirely new approaches to algorithms and robots to achieve AGI. One way researchers are thinking about this is by exploring the concept of embodied cognition. The idea is that robots will need to learn very quickly from their environments through a multitude of senses, just like humans do when they’re very young. Similarly, to develop cognition in the same way humans do, robots will need to experience the physical world like we do (because we’ve designed our spaces based on how our bodies and minds work).

The latest AI-based robot systems are using gen AI technologies including large language models (LLMs) and large behavior models (LBMs). LLMs give robots advanced natural-language-processing capabilities like what we’ve seen with generative AI models and other LLM-enabled tools. LBMs allow robots to emulate human actions and movements. These models are created by training AI on large data sets of observed human actions and movements. Ultimately, these models could allow robots to perform a wide range of activities with limited task-specific training.

A real advance would be to develop new AI systems that start out with a certain level of built-in knowledge, just like a baby fawn knows how to stand and feed without being taught. It’s possible that the recent success of deep-learning-based AI systems may have drawn research attention away from the more fundamental cognitive work required to make progress toward AGI.

• Computing advancements. Graphics processing units (GPUs) have made the major AI advances of the past few years possible . Here’s why. For one, GPUs are designed to handle multiple tasks related to visual data simultaneously, including rendering images, videos, and graphics-related computations. Their efficiency at handling massive amounts of visual data makes them useful in training complex neural networks. They also have a high memory bandwidth, meaning faster data transfer. Before AGI can be achieved, similar significant advancements will need to be made in computing infrastructure. Quantum computing  is touted as one way of achieving this. However, today’s quantum computers, while powerful, aren’t yet ready for everyday applications. But once they are, they could play a role in the achievement of AGI.

Growth in data volume and new sources of data . Some experts believe 5G  mobile infrastructure could bring about a significant increase in data. That’s because the technology could power a surge in connected devices, or the Internet of Things . But, for a variety of reasons, we think most of the benefits of 5G have already appeared . For AGI to be achieved, there will need to be another catalyst for a huge increase in data volume.

New robotics approaches could yield new sources of training data. Placing human-like robots among us could allow companies to mine large sets of data that mimic our own senses to help the robots train themselves. Advanced self-driving cars are one example: data is being collected from cars that are already on the roads, so these vehicles are acting as a training set for future self-driving cars.

What can executives do about AGI?

AGI is still decades away, at the very least. But AI is here to stay—and it is advancing extremely quickly. Smart leaders can think about how to respond to the real progress that’s happening, as well as how to prepare for the automated future. Here are a few things to consider:

• Stay informed about developments in AI and AGI . Connect with start-ups and develop a framework for tracking progress in AGI that is relevant to your business. Also, start to think about the right governance, conditions, and boundaries for success within your business and communities.
• Invest in AI now . “The cost of doing nothing,” says McKinsey senior partner Nicolai Müller , “is just too high  because everybody has this at the top of their agenda. I think it’s the one topic that every management board  has looked into, that every CEO  has explored across all regions and industries.” The organizations that get it right now will be poised to win in the coming era.
• Continue to place humans at the center . Invest in human–machine interfaces, or “human in the loop” technologies that augment human intelligence. People at all levels of an organization need training and support to thrive in an increasingly automated world. AI is just the latest tool to help individuals and companies alike boost their efficiency.
• Consider the ethical and security implications . This should include addressing cybersecurity , data privacy, and algorithm bias.
• Build a strong foundation of data, talent, and capabilities . AI runs on data; having a strong foundation of high-quality data is critical to its success.
• Organize your workers for new economies of scale and skill . Yesterday’s rigid organizational structures and operating models aren’t suited to the reality of rapidly advancing AI. One way to address this is by instituting flow-to-the-work models, where people can move seamlessly between initiatives and groups.
• Place small bets to preserve strategic options in areas of your business that are exposed to AI developments . For example, consider investing in technology firms that are pursuing ambitious AI research and development projects in your industry. Not all these bets will necessarily pay off, but they could help hedge some of the existential risk your business may face in the future.

Learn more about QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey . And check out AI-related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ Generative AI in operations: Capturing the value ,” January 3, 2024, Marie El Hoyek and  Nicolai Müller
• “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” June 14, 2023, Michael Chui , Eric Hazan , Roger Roberts , Alex Singla , Kate Smaje , Alex Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Rodney Zemmel
• “ What every CEO should know about generative AI ,” May 12, 2023, Michael Chui , Roger Roberts , Tanya Rodchenko, Alex Singla , Alex Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Delphine Zurkiya
• “ An executive primer on artificial general intelligence ,” April 29, 2020, Federico Berruti , Pieter Nel, and Rob Whiteman
• “ Notes from the AI frontier: Applications and value of deep learning ,” April 17, 2018, Michael Chui , James Manyika , Mehdi Miremadi, Nicolaus Henke, Rita Chung, Pieter Nel, and Sankalp Malhotra
• “ Augmented and virtual reality: The promise and peril of immersive technologies ,” October 3, 2017, Stefan Hall and Ryo Takahashi

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The Great Read

What deathbed visions teach us about living.

Researchers are documenting a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

Credit... Photo illustration by Amy Friend

Supported by

By Phoebe Zerwick

• March 12, 2024

Chris Kerr was 12 when he first observed a deathbed vision. His memory of that summer in 1974 is blurred, but not the sense of mystery he felt at the bedside of his dying father. Throughout Kerr’s childhood in Toronto, his father, a surgeon, was too busy to spend much time with his son, except for an annual fishing trip they took, just the two of them, to the Canadian wilderness. Gaunt and weakened by cancer at 42, his father reached for the buttons on Kerr’s shirt, fiddled with them and said something about getting ready to catch the plane to their cabin in the woods. “I knew intuitively, I knew wherever he was, must be a good place because we were going fishing,” Kerr told me.

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As he moved to touch his father, Kerr felt a hand on his shoulder. A priest had followed him into the hospital room and was now leading him away, telling him his father was delusional. Kerr’s father died early the next morning. Kerr now calls what he witnessed an end-of-life vision. His father wasn’t delusional, he believes. His mind was taking him to a time and place where he and his son could be together, in the wilds of northern Canada. And the priest, he feels, made a mistake, one that many other caregivers make, of dismissing the moment as a break with reality, as something from which the boy required protection.

It would be more than 40 years before Kerr felt compelled to speak about that evening in the hospital room. He had followed his father, and three generations before him, into medicine and was working at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo, where he was the chief medical officer and conducted research on end-of-life visions. It wasn’t until he gave a TEDx Talk in 2015 that he shared the story of his father’s death. Pacing the stage in the sport coat he always wears, he told the audience: “My point here is, I didn’t choose this topic of dying. I feel it has chosen or followed me.” He went on: “When I was present at the bedside of the dying, I was confronted by what I had seen and tried so hard to forget from my childhood. I saw dying patients reaching and calling out to mothers, and to fathers, and to children, many of whom hadn’t been seen for many years. But what was remarkable was so many of them looked at peace.”

The talk received millions of views and thousands of comments, many from nurses grateful that someone in the medical field validated what they have long understood. Others, too, posted personal stories of having witnessed loved ones’ visions in their final days. For them, Kerr’s message was a kind of confirmation of something they instinctively knew — that deathbed visions are real, can provide comfort, even heal past trauma. That they can, in some cases, feel transcendent. That our minds are capable of conjuring images that help us, at the end, make sense of our lives.

Nothing in Kerr’s medical training prepared him for his first shift at Hospice Buffalo one Saturday morning in the spring of 1999. He had earned a degree from the Medical College of Ohio while working on a Ph.D. in neurobiology. After a residency in internal medicine, Kerr started a fellowship in cardiology in Buffalo. To earn extra money to support his wife and two young daughters, he took a part-time job with Hospice Buffalo. Until then, Kerr had worked in the conventional medical system, focused on patients who were often tethered to machines or heavily medicated. If they recounted visions, he had no time to listen. But in the quiet of Hospice, Kerr found himself in the presence of something he hadn’t seen since his father’s death: patients who spoke of people and places visible only to them. “So just like with my father, there’s just this feeling of reverence, of something that wasn’t understood but certainly felt,” he says.

During one of his shifts, Kerr was checking on a 70-year-old woman named Mary, whose grown children had gathered in her room, drinking wine to lighten the mood. Without warning, Kerr remembers, Mary sat up in her bed and crossed her arms at her chest. “Danny,” she cooed, kissing and cuddling a baby only she could see. At first, her children were confused. There was no Danny in the family, no baby in their mother’s arms. But they could sense that whatever their mother was experiencing brought her a sense of calm. Kerr later learned that long before her four children were born, Mary lost a baby in childbirth. She never spoke of it with her children, but now she was, through a vision, seemingly addressing that loss.

In observing Mary’s final days at Hospice, Kerr found his calling. “I was disillusioned by the assembly-line nature of medicine,” Kerr told me. “This felt like a more humane and dignified model of care.” He quit cardiology to work full time at the bedsides of dying patients. Many of them described visions that drew from their lives and seemed to hold meaning, unlike hallucinations resulting from medication, or delusional, incoherent thinking, which can also occur at the end of life. But Kerr couldn’t persuade other doctors, even young residents making the rounds with him at Hospice, of their value. They wanted scientific proof.

At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study of his own, and in 2010, a research fellow, Anne Banas, signed on to conduct it with him. Like Kerr, Banas had a family member who, before his death, experienced visions — a grandfather who imagined himself in a train station with his brothers.

The study wasn’t designed to answer how these visions differ neurologically from hallucinations or delusions. Rather, Kerr saw his role as chronicler of his patients’ experiences. Borrowing from social-science research methods, Kerr, Banas and their colleagues based their study on daily interviews with patients in the 22-bed inpatient unit at the Hospice campus in the hope of capturing the frequency and varied subject matter of their visions. Patients were screened to ensure that they were lucid and not in a confused or delirious state. The research, published in 2014 in The Journal of Palliative Medicine, found that visions are far more common and frequent than other researchers had found, with an astonishing 88 percent of patients reporting at least one vision. (Later studies in Japan, India, Sweden and Australia confirm that visions are common. The percentages range from about 20 to 80 percent, though a majority of these studies rely on interviews with caregivers and not patients.)

In the last 10 years, Kerr has hired a permanent research team who expanded the studies to include interviews with patients receiving hospice care at home and with their families, deepening the researchers’ understanding of the variety and profundity of these visions. They can occur while patients are asleep or fully conscious. Dead family members figure most prominently, and by contrast, visions involving religious themes are exceedingly rare. Patients often relive seminal moments from their lives, including joyful experiences of falling in love and painful ones of rejection. Some dream of the unresolved tasks of daily life, like paying bills or raising children. Visions also entail past or imagined journeys — whether long car trips or short walks to school. Regardless of the subject matter, the visions, patients say, feel real and entirely unique compared with anything else they’ve ever experienced. They can begin days, even weeks, before death. Most significant, as people near the end of their lives, the frequency of visions increases, further centering on deceased people or pets. It is these final visions that provide patients, and their loved ones, with profound meaning and solace.

Kerr’s latest research is focused on the emotional transformation he has often observed in patients who experience such visions. The first in this series of studies, published in 2019, measured psychological and spiritual growth among two groups of hospice patients: those who had visions and a control group of those who did not. Patients rated their agreement with statements including, “I changed my priorities about what is important in life,” or “I have a better understanding of spiritual matters.” Those who experienced end-of-life visions agreed more strongly with those statements, suggesting that the visions sparked inner change even at the end of life. “It’s the most remarkable of our studies,” Kerr told me. “It highlights the paradox of dying, that while there is physical deterioration, they are growing and finding meaning. It highlights what patients are telling us, that they are being put back together.”

In the many conversations Kerr and I have had over the past year, the contradiction between medicine’s demand for evidence and the ineffable quality of his patients’ experiences came up repeatedly. He was first struck by this tension about a year before the publication of his first study, during a visit with a World War II veteran named John who was tormented throughout his life by nightmares that took him back to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. John had been part of a rescue mission to bring wounded soldiers to England by ship and leave those too far gone to die. The nightmares continued through his dying days, until he dreamed of being discharged from the Army. In a second dream, a fallen soldier appeared to John to tell him that his comrades would soon come to “get” him. The nightmares ended after that.

Kerr has been nagged ever since by the inadequacy of science, and of language, to fully capture the mysteries of the mind. “We were so caught up in trying to quantify and give structure to something so deeply spiritual, and really, we were just bystanders, witnesses to this,” he says. “It feels a little small to be filling in forms when you’re looking at a 90-something-year-old veteran who is back in time 70 years having an experience you can’t even understand.” When Kerr talks about his research at conferences, nurses tend to nod their heads in approval; doctors roll their eyes in disbelief. He finds that skeptics often understand the research best when they watch taped interviews with patients.

What’s striking about this footage, which dates back to Kerr’s early work in 2008, is not so much the content of the visions but rather the patients’ demeanor. “There’s an absence of fear,” Kerr says. A teenage girl’s face lights up as she describes a dream in which she and her deceased aunt were in a castle playing with Barbie dolls. A man dying of cancer talks about his wife, who died several years earlier and who comes to him in his dreams, always in blue. She waves. She smiles. That’s it. But in the moment, he seems to be transported to another time or place.

Kerr has often observed that in the very end, dying people lose interest in the activities that preoccupied them in life and turn toward those they love. As to why, Kerr can only speculate. In his 2020 book, “Death Is but a Dream,” he concludes that the love his patients find in dying often brings them to a place that some call enlightenment and others call God. “Time seems to vanish,” he told me. “The people who loved you well, secured you and contributed to who you are are still accessible at a spiritual and psychological level.”

That was the case with Connor O’Neil, who died at the age of 10 in 2022 and whose parents Kerr and I visited in their home. They told us that just two days before his death, their son called out the name of a family friend who, without the boy’s knowledge, had just died. “Do you know where you are?” Connor’s mother asked. “Heaven,” the boy replied. Connor had barely spoken in days or moved without help, but in that moment, he sat up under his own strength and threw his arms around her neck. “Mommy, I love you,” he said.

Kerr’s research finds that such moments, which transcend the often-painful physical decline in the last days of life, help parents like the O’Neils and other relatives grieve even unfathomable loss. “I don’t know where I would be without that closure, or that gift that was given to us,” Connor’s father told us. “It’s hard enough with it.” As Kerr explains, “It’s the difference between being wounded and soothed.”

In June, I visited the adult daughter of a patient who died at home just days earlier. We sat in her mother’s living room, looking out on the patio and bird feeders that had given the mother so much joy. Three days before her mother’s death, the daughter was straightening up the room when her mother began to speak more lucidly than she had in days. The daughter crawled into her mother’s bed, held her hand and listened. Her mother first spoke to the daughter’s father, whom she could see in the far corner of the room, handsome as ever. She then started speaking with her second husband, visible only to her, yet real enough for the daughter to ask whether he was smoking his pipe. “Can’t you smell it?” her mother replied. Even in the retelling, the moment felt sacred. “I will never, ever forget it,” the daughter told me. “It was so beautiful.”

I also met one of Banas’s patients, Peggy Haloski, who had enrolled in hospice for home care services just days earlier, after doctors at the cancer hospital in Buffalo found blood clots throughout her body, a sign that the yearlong treatment had stopped working. It was time for her husband, Stephen, to keep her comfortable at home, with their two greyhounds.

Stephen led Banas and me to the family room, where Peggy lay on the couch. Banas knelt on the floor, checked her patient’s catheter, reduced her prescriptions so there were fewer pills for her to swallow every day and ordered a numbing cream for pain in her tailbone. She also asked about her visions.

The nurse on call that weekend witnessed Peggy speaking with her dead mother.

“She was standing over here,” Peggy told Banas, gesturing toward the corner of the room.

“Was that the only time you saw her?” Banas asked.

“Do you think you’ll be seeing her more?”

“I will. I will, considering what’s going on.”

Peggy sank deeper into the couch and closed her eyes, recounting another visit from the dead, this time by the first greyhound she and Stephen adopted. “I’m at peace with everybody. I’m happy,” she said. “It’s not time yet. I know it’s not time, but it’s coming.”

When my mother, Chloe Zerwick, was dying in 2018, I had never heard of end-of-life visions. I was acting on intuition when her caregivers started telling me about what we were then calling hallucinations. Mom was 95 and living in her Hudson Valley home under hospice care, with lung disease and congestive heart failure, barely able to leave her bed. The hospice doctor prescribed an opioid for pain and put her on antipsychotic and anti-anxiety medicines to tame the so-called hallucinations he worried were preventing her from sleeping. It is possible that some of these medications caused Mom’s visions, but as Kerr has explained, drug-induced hallucinations do not rule out naturally occurring visions. They can coexist.

In my mother’s case, I inherently understood that her imaginary life was something to honor. I knew what medicine-induced hallucinations looked and felt like. About 10 years before her death, Mom fell and injured her spine. Doctors in the local hospital put her on an opioid to control the pain, which left her acting like a different person. There were spiders crawling on the hospital wall, she said. She mistook her roommate’s bed for a train platform. Worse, she denied that I loved her or ever did. Once we took her off the medicine, the hallucinations vanished.

The visions she was having at the end of her life were entirely different; they were connected to the long life she had led and brought a deep sense of comfort and delight. “You know, for the first time in my life I have no worries,” she told me. I remember feeling a weight lift. After more than a decade of failing health, she seemed to have found a sense of peace.

The day before her death, as her breathing became more labored, Mom made an announcement: “I have a new leader,” she said.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Mark. He’s going to take me to the other side.”

She was speaking of my husband, alive and well back home in North Carolina.

“That’s great, Mom, except that I need him here with me,” I replied. “Do you think he can do both?”

“Oh, yes. He’s very capable.”

That evening, Mom was struggling again to breathe. “I’m thinking of the next world,” she said, and of my husband, who would lead her there. The caregiver on duty for the night and I sat at her bedside as Mom’s oxygen level fell from 68 to 63 to 52 and kept dropping until she died the next morning. My mother was not a brave person in the traditional sense of the word. She was afraid of snakes, the subway platform and any hint of pain. But she faced her death, confident that a man who loves her daughter would guide her to whatever lay ahead.

“Do you think it will happen to you?” she asked me at one point about her dreaming life.

“Maybe it’s genetic,” I replied, not knowing, as I do now, that these experiences are part of what may await us all.

Phoebe Zerwick, the author of “Beyond Innocence: The Life Sentence of Darryl Hunt,” is a North Carolina-based journalist. She teaches journalism and writing at Wake Forest University, where she directs the journalism program. Amy Friend is an artist in Canada whose work focuses on history, time, land-memory, dust, oceans and our connection to the universe.

Here are more fascinating tales you can’t help reading all the way to the end.

Deathbed Visions: Researchers are documenting deathbed visions , a phenomenon that seems to help the dying, as well as those they leave behind.

The Pants Pendulum: Around 2020, the “right” pants began to swing from skinny to wide. But is there even a consensus around trends anymore ?

The Psychic Peril of Mars: NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a human mission to the red planet: the trauma of isolation .

Saved by a Rescue Dog: He spent 13 years addicted to cocaine. Running a shelter for abused and neglected dogs in New York has kept him sober, but it hasn’t been easy .

An Art Mogul's Fall: After a dramatic rise in business and society, Louise Blouin finds herself unloading a Hamptons dream home in bankruptcy court .

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Dogs can understand the meaning of nouns, new research finds

Study confirms our canine companions can grasp more than simple commands – or at least for items they care about

Dogs understand what certain words stand for, according to researchers who monitored the brain activity of willing pooches while they were shown balls, slippers, leashes and other highlights of the domestic canine world.

The finding suggests that the dog brain can reach beyond commands such as “sit” and “fetch”, and the frenzy-inducing “walkies”, to grasp the essence of nouns, or at least those that refer to items the animals care about.

“I think the capacity is there in all dogs,” said Marianna Boros, who helped arrange the experiments at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. “This changes our understanding of language evolution and our sense of what is uniquely human.”

Scientists have long been fascinated by whether dogs can truly learn the meanings of words and have built up some evidence to back the suspicion. A survey in 2022 found that dog owners believed their furry companions responded to between 15 and 215 words.

More direct evidence for canine cognitive prowess came in 2011 when psychologists in South Carolina reported that after three years of intensive training, a border collie called Chaser had learned the names of more than 1,000 objects , including 800 cloth toys, 116 balls and 26 Frisbees.

However, studies have said little about what is happening in the canine brain when it processes words. To delve into the mystery, Boros and her colleagues invited 18 dog owners to bring their pets to the laboratory along with five objects the animals knew well. These included balls, slippers, Frisbees, rubber toys, leads and other items.

At the lab, the owners were instructed to say words for objects before showing their dog either the correct item or a different one. For example, an owner might say “Look, here’s the ball”, but hold up a Frisbee instead. The experiments were repeated multiple times with matching and non-matching objects.

During the tests, researchers monitored the dogs’ brain activity through non-invasive electroencephalography, or EEG. The traces revealed different patterns of activity when the objects matched or clashed with the words their owner said. The difference in the traces was more pronounced for words that owners believed their dogs knew best.

Similar blips in EEG recordings were seen when humans performed the tests and were interpreted as people understanding a word well enough to form a mental representation that was either confirmed or confounded by the object they were subsequently shown.

Writing in Current Biology , the scientists say the results “provide the first neural evidence for object word knowledge in a non-human animal”.

Boros emphasised she was not claiming dogs understood words as well as humans. It will take further work to understand, for example, whether dogs can generalise in the way humans learn to as infants, and grasp that the word “ball” need not refer to one specific, heavily chewed spongy sphere.

The study raises the question of why, if dogs understand certain nouns, more of them don’t show it. One possibility is that a dog knows what a word refers to but is not bothered about acting on it. “My dog only cares about his ball,” said Boros. “If I bring him another toy, he doesn’t care about it at all.”

Dr Holly Root-Gutteridge, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lincoln who was not involved in the study, called the work “fascinating”.

“It’s particularly interesting because I think it’s unlikely this started during domestication, so it may be widespread throughout mammals,” she said. “That’s highly exciting in itself as it shines new light on language evolution.

“It might be that the dogs don’t really care enough about the game of ‘fetch this particular thing’ to play along with the way we’ve been training and testing them so far. Your dog may understand what you’re saying but choose not to act.”

• Animal behaviour

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Exploits & Vulnerabilities

Jenkins Args4j CVE-2024-23897: Files Exposed, Code at Risk

Jenkins, a popular open-source automation server, was discovered to be affected by a file read vulnerability, CVE-2024-23897.

By: Arun Shaji March 19, 2024 Read time:  ( words)

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Jenkins, a popular open-source automation server, was discovered to be affected by a file read vulnerability, CVE-2024-23897 . Jenkins employs a built-in Command-Line Interface (CLI) to facilitate interaction from script or shell environments and uses the args4j library to parse command arguments and options on the Jenkins controller during CLI command processing. The vulnerability exists in this library, allowing an unauthenticated user to read the first few lines of any files on the file system. Additionally, authenticated users can go even further by gaining the ability to read entire files.

Given its high severity we would like to emphasize the need for swift measures to secure Jenkins installations.

Vulnerability Details

• Feature: expandAtFiles
• Description: This command parser feature automatically replaces an '@' character followed by a file path in an argument with the file’s content.
• Enabled By Default: Yes
• Affected Versions: Jenkins 2.441 and earlier, LTS 2.426.2 and earlier.  

Exploitation Scenarios

Attack Vector: Arbitrary File Read 

• Description: Attackers can read arbitrary files on the Jenkins controller file system using the default character encoding of the Jenkins controller process.
• Permissions Impact:  Attackers with Overall/Read permission can read entire files while attackers without Overall/Read permissions can read the first few lines of files. The specific line count depends on available CLI commands. 
• Attack Surface  
• Over 45,000 unpatched Jenkins instances were identified by the non-profit security organization ShadowServer.
• ShadowServer dashboard

Severity: Critical (per Jenkins Advisory: CVSS 10), High (NVD Rating: CVSS 7.5)

Beyond file reads: RCE possibilities

Figure 1 shows some of the possibilities that can result from an “Arbitrary File Read” leading to remote code execution (RCE). More information about this can be found on the Jenkins advisory page.

Recent attacks

Our analysis found several attack instances originating from various regions, with the majority of the source IP addresses of the attacks originating from the Netherlands, as per Shadowserver data. Meanwhile, most of the targets were from South Africa, as shown in Figure 3.

Most of the observed attack events lead to the use of proof-of-concept (POC) scanners. We also came across instances where RCE exploits were actively being traded — specifically, we found entries related to the sale of the CVE-2024-23897 exploit that grants unauthenticated RCE capabilities (although there is a possibility that the exploit in question may be fraudulent or fabricated).

Vulnerability analysis

CVE-2024-23897 can be exploited via HTTP, WebSocket and over Secure Shell (SSH), with the first two having the highest chance of exploitation.

The HTTP endpoint requires making two POST requests by default. One of the requests will send an “upload” request containing the commands and its arguments while the second request is a “download” request to execute the commands and receive the output.

Upon receiving any of these requests, the following methods will be called in order:

The CliCrumbExecution method will validate the endpoint, while the FullDuplexHttpService method deals with request and response (note that PlainCLIProtocol is used to make the request). Finally, the CmdLineParser method, which uses the vulnerable args4j library, is used to parse arguments from the CLI Input.

The Jenkins PlainCLIProtocol

The Jenkins PlainCLIprotcol java class uses a specific binary format that consists of various opcodes and sequential frames.

Each opcode has a Boolean property clientSide indicating whether it is sent from the client to the server (true) or from the server to the client (false). These opcodes are used to define the different types of operations that can be exchanged between the client and server in the CLI protocol.

The Jenkins binary format

Jenkins has a specific binary format that is based off sequential frames. Figure 8 depicts the Jenkins binary format (as provided by Alex Williams ):

The binary format for this protocol involves framing each message with an int length followed by a byte opcode, and then finally by the actual data.

The following is a breakdown of the binary format for a generic message:

Length Field (4 bytes): This represents the length of the message excluding the length field itself and the opcode. It is Encoded as a 32-bit signed integer in network byte order (big-endian).

Opcode Field (1 byte): This represents the operation code (opcode) for the message.

Data Field: This is the actual data specific to the opcode.

Vulnerable Code

The vulnerable code can be found in the Args4j library

Functionality in regular use

Normally, the “@” in Jenkins-cli is used to specify a file containing the bearer token or username:password from a file.

Using an authenticated command with Jenkins-cli will produce the following output:

Using the feature “@” to specify the password.txt file in -auth switch produces the following:

Vulnerability scenario

Passing “@” as an argument to available Jenkins-cli commands will result in the output shown in Figure 13.

As seen in the image, data is exposed in the error output, even though the “version” command does not take any arguments.

The extent of information disclosure is contingent on the command argument patterns. For instance, if the argument allows list inputs, it signifies a potential for more extensive data exposure:

$ java -jar jenkins-cli.jar -s http://172.17.0[.]1:8080/ -auth admin:pass reload-job @/etc/passwd

In our recent research, we've identified reload-job as an alternative to the commonly used connect-node command for reading multiple lines.

Other examples include delete-job, delete-node, disconnect-node, offline-node, and online-node .

Alternative attack vector: unauthenticated users

Table 1. Alternative attack vector for unauthenticated users

Alternative Attack Vectors: Authenticated users

Table 2. Alternative attack vector for authenticated users

Attack request via Windows

In the context of this attack, where a request originates from a Windows machine to a Jenkins Linux server, the observed encoding is identified as windows-1252.

Attack Request via Linux

If the request is from a Linux machine to a Jenkins Linux server, the observed encoding is UTF-8 in the context of this attack.

Attack Request via WebSocket

WebSocket-based attack requests will have masking on the data, resulting in user input being invisible.

Jenkins patched CVE-2024-23897 in versions 2.442 and LTS 2.426.3 by disabling the problematic command parser feature. Users are strongly recommended to apply this update at the soonest possible time to avoid any potential security incidents.

Trend Micro Solutions

The following protections exist to detect and protect Trend customers against CVE-2024-23897:

Trend Vision One Endpoint Security, Trend Cloud One - Workload and Endpoint Security, Deep Security and Vulnerability Protection IPS Rules

• 1011966 - Jenkins Arbitrary File Read Vulnerability Over HTTP (CVE-2024-23897)
• 1011976 - Jenkins Arbitrary File Read Vulnerability Over WebSocket (CVE-2024-23897)

Trend Micro Cloud One - Network Security & TippingPoint Filters

• 43766: HTTP: Jenkins CI Server Arbitrary File Read Vulnerability

Trend Vision One Network Sensor and Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector (DDI) Rule

• 4997 - CVE-2024-23897 - Jenkins Authentication Bypass Exploit - HTTP (Request)

Information Security Specialist

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