Use Kudos to maximise and measure the impact of your research

Edwina Thorn, Journals Executive, Policy Press

As the volume of scholarly publications proliferates, you may well wonder whether the research you have worked so hard to publish is actually reaching readers and making a difference. You may also find that you are increasingly expected to demonstrate the impact of your work in grant applications or performance reviews.

At Policy Press we want to help and have partnered with Kudos to help you maximise and measure the impact of your research. This blog post is intended to provide quick and practical tips on how to use this service.

What is Kudos?
Kudos is intuitive and free to use for authors. It saves time by allowing authors to manage the promotion of all their publications across different forms of social media and email, and by providing a range of article level metrics (including altmetrics, citations, and downloads) – all in a single place.

When you create an account at https://www.growkudos.com/ you can start ‘claiming’ your research publications so that they appear in your author dashboard (If you have an ORCID ID you can save time by importing your publication list).

Kudos has three main functions: Explain, Share and Measure.

Explain
Kudos allows authors to add brief, plain language notes explaining what their article is about and why it’s important. You can find a guide to writing a really good plain language summary on the Kudos blog: Explain your work – the Kudos way. There is also space for author perspectives and links to other resources, such as presentations, videos, interviews, news coverage, figures, data-sets or related publications.

At Policy Press we are now collecting plain language summaries at article submission stage, so if you complete this field when you originally submit the article, the ‘What’s it about?’ box will already be filled in for you.

With the help of the Kudos widget this information is not only available on the Kudos platform, but can be incorporated into other websites, including publisher platforms or institutional research repositories. For Policy Press journals we’ve added the Kudos widget to Ingenta, so that readers can access the plain language summaries and impact statements added via Kudos directly from the article abstract page.

Share
Authors can share the information and resources they have added to their publications easily via social media and email directly from the Kudos platform. Kudos creates trackable links, so that the effects of this sharing activity are measured and displayed in the Author Dashboard. This way authors always know how effective the time they have spent sharing their research has been.

Measure
Kudos makes it easy for authors to measure the impact of their work by providing article level metrics in the Author Dashboard. At a single glance, authors can see:

• -How often their articles have been downloaded,
• -How often they have been cited (in publications indexed in Web of Science),
• -Their Altmetric scores (see What are Altmetrics? for further information),
• -How often they have been viewed and shared on Kudos,
• -How often people have clicked through to the original articles from Kudos.

NB – The above is an anonymised example of a Kudos author dashboard. Full text downloads are only available for articles where the publisher partners with Kudos. Full text download data are available on Kudos for all Policy Press journals.

Does Kudos work?
The Altmetrics Research Team at the Centre for HEalthy and Sustainable CitieS (CHESS), Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore analysed data from the first two years of Kudos usage. They found that use of the Kudos toolkit by researchers led to 23% higher downloads of full text articles from the publishers’ sites.

Time-saving tips:

1. Use your ORCID ID to import your publications list – there’s no need to search for each publication separately, and Kudos will automatically update your publications list every week.
2. Add a plain language summary when you submit a journal article via Editorial Manager. It’ll be automatically transmitted to Kudos on acceptance.
3. Authorise Kudos to connect to your social media accounts, so you can share your research on social media directly from your Kudos profile. Kudos uses trackable links, so that you can measure the impact of your activities.

So why not try it out on one of your Policy Press publications?  Watch this recording of our recent webinar or contact pp-journals@bristol.ac.uk for further information.