Increasing Article Visibility: JABFM and Author Responsibilities and Possibilities

Digital Object Number (DOI) versus URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

DOI is the recommended approach to disseminate your work. Most importantly, DOIs are forever and will not result in broken links that may occur with URLs that are often temporary, especially if the hosting site changes. However, whether you use the DOI or the URL to the HTML version on the journal website, when readers click on a link, this provides a metric of use called “readership,” and this evidence of use may be useful for author efforts to document the impact of their work, such as in a promotion application. It is also useful for editorial boards to understand the extent to which each article is read.

Author Responsibilities

Authors have a major role in promoting visibility and readership of their work. Authors will benefit from publicizing their work and linking their publication to social media. Keep in mind (as discussed above) that disseminating the PDF will depress readership metric; it is preferable to disseminate the article’s unique DOI. So, in each of the following, include a link to the DOI or HTML full-text on the JABFM home page. Avoid attaching the article PDF, as readership numbers are not captured from PDFs, only from links.

1. Press Releases: Develop press releases with your institution’s office of marketing and communications. Strategize about dissemination outlets with your institution.

2. Social Media: Condense press releases to develop a brief synopsis for social media. Assist readers to find your article by including the article DOI, which may be shorter than the URL.

   • Include a synopsis and link to your article on social media sites (e.g. LinkedIn and Doximity).

   • Tweet and post about accepted or newly published papers.

   • Email links to your article to colleagues and interested others.

3. Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID): Add article details to your ORCID profile. The ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors and contributors. Visit https://orcid.org/ for more information.

4. Google Scholar: An online, freely accessible search engine that lets users look for both physical and digital copies of articles. If your publication is not found in Google Scholar, you can manually add your article. Go to http://posts.google.com/author.

JABFM Actions to Promote Article Visibility

JABFM actively promotes the visibility of your article in the following ways:

• Open Access: The free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment (SPARC).⁴ Open access articles have higher citations compared with subscription access articles.⁵ Believing that the public and scientific communities are best served by open access to information, the American Board of Family Medicine provides JABFM articles available free of charge and without registration at www.jabfm.org.

• eTOCS: Links to the HTML full-text articles are included in the table of contents (eTOCs) for upcoming issues emailed to JABFM subscribers (>88,000). To become a subscriber, please go to: https://www.jabfm.org/alerts.

• Twitter: We tweet on articles “in press” or recently published. These have links to the “abstracts in press” page on the JABFM website. See https://twitter.com/journal_board.

• Facebook: The editorial office links each new issue to our Facebook page (along with calls for papers and other important news): https://www.facebook.com/Journal-of-the-American-Board-of-Family-Medicine-JABFM-40952212923/.

• YouTube: The JABFM YouTube channel is available for videos related to author publications and supplementary files. Contact the editorial office for more information (jabfm{at}med.wayne.edu) or the website https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy3WMU2yr5SD9zwoLJgqrsw.

• PubMed Central: The JABFM assists authors with meeting their obligation to deposit articles into PubMed Central. This satisfies the federal policy that NIH-funded research reports are made available to the public within 12 months of publication.

• Indexing: JABFM content is indexed by Journal Citation Reports, Medline, MedScape, ProQuest, PubMed, Science Open, Web of Science, WONCA, and many other services. To see the full list, visit the JABFM website at: (https://www.jabfm.org/content/indexing).

• Editors’ Blog: A summary of each issue is found on the “JABFM Editors’ Blog”, located on our website at: https://www.jabfm.org/content/editors-blog.

In summary, the JABFM collaborates with authors to increase the impact of their work by using social media to reach policymakers and clinical care providers. The ultimate goal is to hasten primary care research into practice. We welcome reader suggestions for additional strategies to improve the visibility of author publications (e-mail: jabfm{at}med.wayne.edu).