Publishing academic articles plays a significant role in the tenure and promotion process–serving as a symbol of our expertise and contributions to our specific fields. Most academics may leave it at that—leaving their knowledge to trickle around academic spaces and move on to their many other responsibilities. However, promoting your work can also open doors for you. While the visibility and impact of our work are also factors that are considered in tenure and promotion decisions, promoting our academic articles serves a larger purpose. For example, sharing your work outside of academia allows the general public to gain access to important research, data, and findings which can influence both the general field and policy decisions.
As academics, we can spend a considerable amount of time promoting our work at national conferences and meetings, leveraging social media, and focusing on disseminating our work within our field. This may seem tedious, but doing this work can help your research reach outside of academic circles, where you can connect more directly with the communities which may benefit from your research. Promoting my research within children’s literature through blogging about books, advocacy, and publishing my work created such opportunities for me. For example, if I had never written an academic blog about book deserts that went viral, I doubt that I would have been given the opportunity to feature on the Scholastic Blog, or invited to serve on the Reading Rainbow Advisory Committee.
As academics, you must learn to become comfortable with self-promotion of your work. We had to learn early on that this is a critical aspect of academic life. Sharing your work can be a challenge for people who are more introverted or for academics who intensely focus more on the joy of their work and less on the social aspects of academic life. Additionally, if you are battling with imposter syndrome this presents more of a challenge to sharing your academic work as well.
More recently, I tested the bounds of my imposter syndrome by uploading one of my journal articles to my academic institution’s repository for research, scholarship and creative works. This repository is open access and allows anyone who is using platforms such as Google Scholar to gain access to your work. When I checked my article’s stats at the beginning of the Spring ‘25 semester, I was surprised to learn that my article was read and downloaded by hundreds of people across the world. There were multiple downloads from academic institutions in Brazil and eastern Europe as well as myriad downloads within the United States. Seeing these statistics was a great boost of confidence in who I am as a scholar, and it has motivated me to continue to promote my research. Consequently, I have become more active on LinkedIn where I share my research but have also made meaningful connections with other scholars who I plan to collaborate with. I finally understand that in order to make the type of change that I want to make in the field of education, I have to increase the visibility of my work. To know that students and educators can be positively impacted by my research brings me a sense of fulfillment that I never knew I could feel in academia.
So, if you, like me, are thinking about dipping your toes into sharing your work more broadly to increase the impact and usage of your research, here is some advice:
1. Upload your research to open-access online repositories or publishing in open-access journals: Websites such as Google Scholar, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Web of Science, university-based online repositories, and the Digital Commons allows scholars to upload their academic articles in order to increase the visibility of their work. I have used these sites and received thousands of views of my work. The sites provide analytics and data which can be used for your case for tenure and promotion as well.
2. Utilize microblogging social media sites: For example, the social media platform Bluesky has a “feed” feature which allows users to create a feed to share research from their field to the general public. Thousands of users can subscribe to this feed for free to get the information you post.
3. Starting special interest groups at annual state conferences: Special interest groups are a great way to build consensus across various academic institutions and to focus on critical policy-level work with colleagues. Smaller conferences offer greater opportunities for networking and creating co-published work.
Being an advocate for your own work may feel daunting, tedious, and vulnerable, but it can allow you to reap great rewards. Not only can it establish your reputation a thought-leader in your field, it can also give you a greater sense of fulfillment in knowing that your work is being put to good use to improve people’s lives. I encourage you to test out the bounds of your imposter syndrome, stick your neck out, and be a proud promoter of your hard work. Who knows where it may take you!
