USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA TO ENHANCE THE IMPACT OF PUBLISHED PAPERS

A major goal of research and scientific writings is to promote the frontier of knowledge. This in turn benefits the researcher with associated increase in reputation and attendant career progression. Increasingly, researchers are being evaluated based upon their publications as well as the number of citations these publications received. One of the key ways to increase citations is to expose the research output to a wider audience because people can only cite articles that they are aware of. As opined by Marashi et al, citations to an article may strongly hinge on the visibility instead of merit1. Furthermore, Ebrahim argues that in the future, writing a high quality article in journals will only give it a fifty percent chance of getting cited, while the promotion and broad dissemination of the publications will be needed to complete the other fifty percent.2,