Improve my Performance

What can I do to increase the performance of my publications?

Kudos provides tools to help you increase usage of and citations to your research publications. Once you’ve claimed your publications on the Kudos website, complete the following three steps to help maximize the visibility of your work:

Step 1: Explain your publications

Adding a short title to your publications will help make them easier to find and can help increase citations. Make the title specific, descriptive, concise, and comprehensible to a broad range of readers. Studies show that the construction of an article title has a significant impact on how frequently the paper is cited [1]. Studies also show articles with short titles can be more highly cited [2].

Adding a simple, non-technical explanation (lay summary) of your publication will make it easier to find, and more accessible to a broader audience. Adding an explanation of what is most unique and/or timely about your work (impact statement), and the difference it might make, will also help increase readership.


Useful resources to help you write lay summaries and impact statements:

Step 2: Enrich your publications

Link your publications to related resources such as images, videos, blogs, data sets etc. These additional resources also help give readers a broader view of your work and can help increase citations.

Studies that made data available in a public repository received 9% more citations than similar studies for which the data was not made available. Publicly available data was significantly (p=0.006) associated with a 69% increase in citations, independently of journal impact factor, date of publication, and author country of origin using linear regression [3]. Evidence also exists from individual publishers that linking videos to articles can increase downloads.

Step 3: Share your publications

Sharing your publications by email and social media can significantly increase usage and citations. For example, one study showed that highly tweeted articles are 11 times more likely to be highly cited than less tweeted articles [4].

Significant evidence also exists that promoting individual articles generally positively impacts on publication performance. One study showed that the difference in citation count for promoted articles versus non- promoted articles can still be observed for more than 3 years post publication [5].

Why should I do this, my publisher already markets my publications?

With over 1 million research articles published every year, it’s getting more difficult to get important publications the attention they deserve.

Kudos helps authors explain, add links to and share their work in a way that helps bring it to the attention of your peers, the media, and broader audiences both within and beyond your specialist community. This supplements the work that publishers already do, but they are often dealing with many hundreds or thousands of publications. As the author, you have the network and knowledge to make a dramatic difference to the reach and usage of your work – now Kudos gives you the tools to help with this.

This will become increasingly important as authors are increasingly assessed based on the usage of and citations to individual publications (articles, book chapters etc.) as opposed to more general measures of performance such as journal impact factors.

Where’s the evidence that Kudos will make a difference?

As earlier outlined, there is a wide range of evidence available that suggests the tools provided by Kudos can directly increase publication usage and citations. In a pilot version of Kudos during 2013, researchers using the Kudos sharing tools saw an average increase in downloads of their publications of 19% compared to a control group.

Other studies have shown that using social networks to share information about publications, and linking videos and data to articles can help increase citations, as does having a short title.

Kudos will be tracking the effectiveness of all the tools we offer throughout 2014 and will provide ongoing information to registered users on their overall effectiveness. In this way we aim to work with our users to help focus their time on those activities within Kudos that have most impact on increasing publication usage and citations.


[1] The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals JRSM Short Reports. Thomas S Jacques, Neil J Sebire (2010), doi: 10.1258/shorts.2009.100020

[2] Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often Carlos Eduardo Paiva,I,,II João Paulo da Silveira Nogueira Lima,I and Bianca Sakamoto Ribeiro PaivaII Clinics (Sao Paulo). 2012 May; 67(5): 509– 513, doi: 10.6061/clinics/2012(05)17

[3] Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. Heather A. Piwowar, Roger S. Day, Douglas B. Fridsma (2007). PLoS ONE. Published: March 21, 2007. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000308; Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. Heather Piwowar, Todd J Vision (2013).

[4] Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact, Gunther Eysenbach. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi: 10.2196/jmir.2012

[5] Importance of the lay press in the transmission of medical knowledge to the scientific community, Phillips, D.P., Kanter, E.J., Bednarczyk, B., and Tastad, P.T. 1991. New England Journal of Medicine, 325: 1180–1183. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199110173251620