Scholarly Profiles and Identifiers

Kudos: A Science Communication Tool

One of the best ways to boost the visibility and discoverability of your work (i.e., through search engine results) is to post a variety of outputs (e.g., videos, data sets, blog posts, slides) with simple and engaging titles. Kudos allows you to summarize your scholarly publications for the lay audience or for an audience outside your field or subfield, depending on who you want to reach. Such a summary page, especially when shared, will also help boost visibility on major search engines.

For example, this Kudos summary page provides a TL;DR summary of a journal article for academic librarians outside the fields of scholarly communication and copyright literacy; it also links to a relevant library guide and the Open Access version of the work. 

When the summary page is shared on various platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, listservs, etc.), the action of sharing it, especially on social media, influences the Google PageRank, as well as other algorithms, to bring it to the top of search results. In addition, the unique link is trackable, and Kudos provides unique metrics as feedback for where you get the most traction through your shares, such as these "clicks on share" metrics: 

Based on these metrics, it can be assumed that Twitter, with 29 "clicks on share," has the most traction, and I can assume there were likely 29 clicks on the link I shared on Twitter of my Kudos summary page (though it is possible that some of these come from software applications). In addition, Kudos provides an overview of metrics at the top of the Publication Metrics page, like this one:

In the example above, there have been 42 "clicks on shares," which means that there have been 42 clicks on the link that was shared on the various platforms; however, there have been 120 views on Kudos, which might mean that users are finding the Kudos summary page via other avenues, likely on search engines. 

Note: currently, Kudos only supports communication of formal publications with DOIs; other non-traditional scholarly outputs can be communicated via other tools, such as your own personal or professional website, though they're not as likely to garner as much traction on search engines and do not provide as many insightful metrics and usage statistics. 

Tips:

• Titles should be clear and to the point (in the Kudos version) and relevant keywords should be woven into the simple abstract
• Supplementary content can be added and linked on the Kudos summary page, such as:
  • Datasets, blogs promoting or discussing the publication, Open Access versions of the publication, videos, etc.
• In the 'Why is it important?' section:
  • Explain why the work is unique, timely, and/or impactful
• Keep in mind:
  • If co-authors also use Kudos, everything but the 'Perspectives' section will be the same for that Kudos summary page.