What is Kudos?

Kudos is a web-based service that aims to help increase the visibility and impact of research and build academic reputations. It is free for researchers.

How does Kudos increase the impact of your research?

Your research has been published and with the aim of increasing readership, you have shared or promoted it across various online channels; how can you be sure what works?

Kudos is designed to be a central independent system from which to manage communications for your publications wherever you publish and/or whichever “channel’ you use to communicate, bringing together different metrics to understand which actions are driving results.

“Kudos is designed to be a central independent system…bringing together metrics to  understand which actions are driving  results.”

What do you need to do as an author?

There are 3 simple steps towards increasing the impact of your research; explain, share and measure.

Step 1:

Claim and explain your article. Once registered with Kudos (you can use your ORCID if you have one) you will be able to find your publication and ‘claim’ it. Explain your article by adding a plain language summary to make it more discoverable – which means more usage and more citations. For example if your title is long with a narrow focus, plain language impact statements make articles appeal more to other researchers in different fields, increasing the reach of the article. Tip: Use language that will be comprehensible to non-academics or researchers in other fields.

At this stage, you can add links to related resources that help to bring your work to life, set it in context, or drive further research (code, methods, data, slides, video, press coverage, blog postings etc.).

By explaining and enriching your article, you are making it easier for:

• People using non-specialist terms to find otherwise “hidden” works – increasing cross-disciplinary readership and citations.
• People within your field to skim and scan more publications.
• People in adjacent fields to understand the relevance of your work to what they are doing.
• People outside academia to get a handle on research and apply it in non-academic ways.
• Non-English speakers – ensuring your work has impact globally.

Step 2:

Share your article. You have enriched your article by adding a plain language summary and related resources, and you are ready to share your work across different social channels.  Kudos generates ‘trackable’ links for you to share via your email, web and social networks. This gives you a unique insight into which tools/channels are most effective. On average, authors who make use of Kudos’ sharing tools receive 23% higher downloads of their work.

 

“Trackable links give you a unique insight into which tools/channels are most effective”

Step 3:

Measure the impact of your activity through comprehensive personalised metrics. The personal metrics dashboard in Kudos allows you to see all your claimed article metrics together on one page on My Dashboard – which can be accessed under the My Tools drop-down menu.

Minimal effort, great results…

On average, it takes just 15 minutes to complete these 3 simple steps; a very acceptable duration of time to increase usage and citations.

If you have recently had an article published in a Liverpool University Press journal, you can register with Kudos and begin using the service immediately, completely free of charge.