Make your research discoverable and visible

Guidance on ORCID and other persistent identifiers; advice on making your research more discoverable and visible.

Contact the Open Research team

ORCID id: identifier for researchers

ORCID is a researcher identifier that:

Ensures your research outputs and activities are correctly attributed to you
Connects you with your contributions and affiliations
Makes your research outputs and activities more discoverable.

Watch the Why ORCID? video to find out more.

Create an ORCID or register your existing ORCID:

Visit the Open Research Repository
In the top right corner, select 'Surrey researchers sign in' (use your university username and password)
Select 'edit profile' (top left corner). Scroll down. Under 'global IDs', select 'register' or 'connect' your ORCID ID.

DOI: identifier for digital research outputs

The digital object identifier (DOI) is a persistent identifier used for journal articles, but DOIs can be also used for other research outputs. DOIs do not change even if your publisher or data repository changes. DOIs can also help with plagiarism screening, cited-by linking, text and data mining etc.

Getting a DOI for your research outputs provides a permanent link to them, so makes it much easier for others to find your work and cite it correctly.

At Surrey, we can assign DOIs to the following research works:

Art works
Book chapters
Compositions
Data and data sets – this is now a requirement of the University’s Research Data Management Policy (PDF)
Performances
PhD theses - this is now part of the University’s e-theses process
Portfolios
Preprints
Reports
Working papers.

ISBN: identifier for books

An ISBN is a persistent identifier for books, monographs or conference proceedings. It allows different product forms and editions of a book, whether printed or digital, to be clearly identifiable. It facilitates compilation and updating of book-trade directories and bibliographic databases, such as repositories.

The University of Surrey holds a licence to register ISBNs.

If you are hosting a conference and need an ISBN for your conference proceedings, please email us (openresearch@surrey.ac.uk) the details of the conference and we will allocate an ISBN.

Similarly, if you want to privately publish a report or monograph, send us the information and we will assign an ISBN.

These works can also be made available via the SRI Open Research Repository.

Promote your research

Once you have shared your research Open Access, it is important that you publicise your work further, to make sure that it is as visible as possible, to as many audiences as possible. Below we provide some advice on how to increase the visibility of your research.

Using keywords

Thinking strategically about the keywords submitted with a journal article can significantly enhance the discoverability and visibility of your research – leading to greater readership, recognition and impact.

Keywords are also a way of indicating if your publication is related to a research theme, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or is in a new emergent field. Most journals enable authors to submit a number (usually 4 - 8) of keywords with their articles.

Resources

Read through carefully chosen keywords for the Sustainable Development Goals that reflect the precise language of the UN declaration, as used by the THE Impact Ranking.

Take a look at publisher advice on the optimisation of keywords from: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, and IEEE.

See our full guide to using keywords (PDF).

Keyword tips

Person in suit on their mobile with the word 'keyword' up on their laptop screen

Accurately convey your keywords

Keywords should accurately convey the key concepts and main topic of your research

Man in a suit sat at a table and watching something on his laptop

Balance your keywords for diversity

Balance the specificity of the research topic with more general terms used in the subject literature; this will open your work to a more diverse readership

Phrases are more effective

Phrases of 2 - 3 words (e.g., ‘circular economy’; ‘sustainable tourism policy’) are often more effective than single-words, which can be too equivocal

Use keywords your readers might use

Use variants of the terms or phrases used in the title. Rather than duplicate words already in the title, keywords are an opportunity to use alternative terms which your readers might use

Test on search engines

Publishers recommend that researchers test out their proposed keywords in search engines and indexing services to check if these keywords would place their publication alongside comparable work

Tips for getting your research data discovered

There are a number of things you can do to make your research data easy to find, easy to reuse and importantly, easy to cite.

Use a disciplinary repository

Deposit your data in a disciplinary repository (see storing and preserving your data):

A recognised disciplinary repository is the first place others in your field will look for data that is relevant to their research
Disciplinary repositories will often put more effort into curating and promoting your data
Data repositories will rank highly in search engine results
If an appropriate disciplinary repository doesn’t exist, you can use a generic one such as Zenodo and Figshare or use the University’s Open Research Repository.

Write clear metadata

Ensure the metadata record associated with your research data is as clear, comprehensive, and as complete as possible. The better the description of your data, the easier it will be to find and identify it.

Use a DOI

Get a DOI assigned to your research data and use it:

A DOI is a permanent link to the location of your data; it’s the quickest way to ensure that other researchers can find your data quickly and easily
Remember to include the DOI in the data statement of any relevant publications.

See open data guidance on how to make your data understandable and reusable.

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