Notes on Research Visibility
Practical, evidence-minded writing on how research gets seen — citations, the attention dynamics of science, AI search, and the craft of making good work impossible to overlook. From the team behind Loud Camel.
Two series to start with: the three reasons researchers stay invisible, and the academic careers field guide.
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Your worst blind spot is the thing you are best at
Your worst blind spot hides in the skill you are most expert at. A layoff, a Talmudic line about the beam in your own eye, and how to go looking for what you cannot see.
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She could've been Erdős-1, but she was shy
She turned down a paper with Paul Erdős because she was too shy. On the gender gap in self-promotion, why visibility is part of the job, and how to leave a trail without bragging.
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It's not the Matthew effect. It's the Daniel effect.
Early success predicts later success — Merton called it the Matthew effect. Why AI doesn't level the field the way it appears to, and what to do about a cold start with no audience.
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Why your acquaintances, not your closest friends, bring you the next opportunity
Granovetter's 'strength of weak ties': most useful job leads come from acquaintances you see rarely, not your closest circle. How to put yourself near the next opportunity.
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Is it ethical to use AI to promote your research?
Is it ethical to use AI to promote your research? The case that it is unethical not to — because if careful researchers stay quiet, the reckless inherit the microphone.
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Why the wording of your abstract affects how often you get cited
A 136,615-paper study found that abstracts with more promotional language drew more citations, views, and media coverage — even within Nature, Science, and PNAS.
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LLMs sharpen the Matthew effect in citations
LLMs asked to suggest references favor already-highly-cited papers, reproducing the Matthew effect in citations. Treat the first references a model suggests as a starting list, not the final one.
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An Illustrated Guide to Academic Publishing
An illustrated story of how a paper is born — and why, among five million papers a year, most are read by almost no one. The problem is rarely quality; it is visibility.
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Where you debut probably decides where you stay
A network study of nearly 500,000 artists shows the first five exhibitions predict the next thirty. The same gatekeeper dynamics shape any institutional career — choose your first move carefully.
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AI Articles Overtook Human Articles. That Is Not Automatically Bad
AI-generated articles now outnumber human-written ones. That is a shift in production, not an automatic decline — the leverage moves from writing to filtering and quality signals.
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Promoted papers keep pulling ahead: what the Kudlow RCT looks like at 36 months
A randomized controlled trial (Kudlow, Brown & Eysenbach, JMIR 2021) shows six months of cheap paper promotion produced a citation gap that kept widening for three years after the promotion stopped.