Kudos: Support for increasing the reach and impact of your publications

Kudos is a free service that helps you maximize the reach and impact of your published work. It’s quick too – it takes on average 15 minutes to explain your work in plain language and share it via your email, web and social networks. This makes your work more visible and accessible, and enables you to track the effect of the different places you share it, against a range of metrics including full text downloads, altmetrics and citations.

By bringing together your communications activities with this range of publication metrics, Kudos is uniquely able to help you decide how and where to communicate about your work. In a pilot program, publications that were shared through the Kudos tools received on average 19% more downloads than those in a control group. Kudos is free and easy to use.

Register for Kudos at: www.kudos.com/go/ncif

More details:

• Kudos site
• Short introductory video
• Kudos User Guide
• FAQ

Please contact the Scientific Library, if you have any questions about Kudos.

Kudos FAQ

1. What is Kudos? A free web-based service for increasing the reach and impact of published research.
2. What do researchers have to do? Register, find a publication or two, explain them in plain language, and use Kudos to share them via your existing email, web and social networks – then sit back and watch the increase in usage! Kudos uniquely helps you to measure the effect of these actions on downloads, altmetrics and citations. Once you see the system working for your work, you can go back and find, explain and share other publications.
3. What’s in it for me? Sharing your work, and creating simple descriptions that Kudos can share on your behalf, maximizes the likelihood of it being found and applied – both within, and beyond, your field. This helps increase its impact; in a pilot program, publications that were shared through the Kudos tools received on average 19% more downloads than those in a control group.
4. How does this differ from other services that researchers use? Kudos is the only toolkit specifically designed to help you take control of the reach and impact of your published work, to provide tools and guidance for explaining and sharing your research for wider audiences, and to bring together in one place multiple datasets about the performance of your publications.
   • ORCID: gives you a unique identifier, and enables you to list your publications. If you have done this, you can connect your ORCID and Kudos accounts to save you doing this part of the process again when you use Kudos to explain and share your work. More information on ORCID
   • ResearchGate: allows you to create a profile but does not provide tools for increasing the reach and impact of your work, and does not bring in metrics from other systems to give you a one-stop view of how your publications are performing.
5. What evidence supports the Kudos concept?
   
   August 2016 article from Nature about Kudos
   
   A number of interesting studies build the case for Kudos, for example:
   • Publications with shorter / simpler titles attract more citations:
     • C.E. Paiva et al (2012). Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often. Clinics (Sao Paulo). (doi: 10.6061/clinics/2012(05)17)
     • T.S. Jacques and N.J. Sebire (2010). The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals. The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Short Reports. (doi:10.1258/shorts.2009.100020)
   • Lay communication contributes to scientific impact:
     • X. Liang et al (2014). Building Buzz: (Scientists) Communicating Science in New Media Environments. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. (doi: 10.1177/1077699014550092)
     • D.P. Phillips et al (1991). Importance of the Lay Press in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge to the Scientific Community. (doi:10.1056/NEJM199110173251620)
   • Using social media can increase citations and use:
     • H.G. Allen et al (2013). Socia Media Release Increases Dissemination of Original Articles in the Clinical Pain Sciences. PLOS One. (doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0068914))
     • M. Terras (2012). Can Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter and Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact Journal of Digital Humanities.
     • G. Eysenbach (2011). The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment. Journal of Medical Internet Research. (doi: 10.2196/jmir.2012)
   • Adding related resources can increase citations.
     • H. Piwowar and T.J. Vision (2013). Data reuse and the open data citation advantage. PeerJ PrePrints. (doi: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.1v1)
     • H.A. Piwowar et al (2007). Sharing Detailed Research Data is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLOS One. (doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000308)