Category
Essays
17 posts.
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Show up where the conversation is
Two low-effort habits that compound into lasting academic visibility: answer one public question a month where your sub-sub-field actually asks them, and give the same sharp talk many times instead of writing a new one each time.
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Email the people whose work you cited
Every paper ships with a built-in list of 30 to 60 people who already care about your topic: the authors you cited. Almost nobody emails any of them. Here is how, and the template to do it.
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The ground keeps moving: why visibility is maintenance, not a project
A perfect one-time visibility setup still decays, because the platforms that carry your audience keep moving. New data on 276,431 scholars shows how fast the ground shifts, and what to do about it.
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Post the preprint
Preprints get cited earlier and, in many fields, more. The reflex to wait until acceptance is quietly costing you citations. Here is how to stop, and the version cadence that turns one paper into three citation events.
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The most effective visibility work doesn't look like self-promotion
If self-promotion feels gauche to you, good news: the highest-payoff visibility work isn't self-promotion at all. It's discoverability infrastructure, aimed at the reader, and you can do all of it without ever bragging.
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You mean to, and you won't: the intention gap in research visibility
About 90% of researchers value public engagement. About 32% actually do it. The gap isn't willpower, it's the lack of a recurring prompt. Here is the fix.
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Deposit it and they will not come: open access isn't the same as discovery
A study of 217,589 repository records found that visits are brutally skewed: a few records get almost everything, most get almost nothing. Uploading is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient.
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The credit problem in team science
Teams produce most of the research impact, but one author takes most of the credit. If you are a middle author, the publication itself will not make your contribution visible. Here is what to do about it.
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Findability isn't spray-tweeting: the honest case for promoting your work
A 2024 randomized trial showed that tweeting your paper buys downloads, not citations. So here is the honest version of the case for promotion: be findable, don't broadcast.
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Stop telling me what to do. Tell me what you want to know.
Most research-visibility work changes nothing. A six-year analysis that ended in one question, and how to tell which visibility tasks are worth doing.
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Your one-week spike: why posting once doesn't keep your work visible
95% of the tweets about a paper happen in its first seven days. A single launch post is a one-week event, not a strategy. Here is what to do instead.
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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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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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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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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.