Promoting your article

De Gruyter is committed to delivering the best possible user experience through our digital infrastructure. That is why we are continuously investing in improving our website. We are excited to be able to offer readers a new, beautifully designed user-friendly interface.

Re-launched in 2021, degruyter.com not only comes with a fresh new look, but offers more speed, performance and functionality, including stable page accessibility, improved search, and increased search engine optimizations to make content more discoverable. Product pages have been upgraded to include content display with new inline PDF view for articles, figure viewer and article TOCs. Furthermore, the new platform features improved means of content dissemination via diverse citation export options and OpenURL.

We are also making continuous enhancements to our mobile interface, one of the fastest growing article readership channels.

Each article hosted on De Gruyter’s platform receives its own homepage, where readers and researchers can find information about the article, Editorial team members, submission guidelines, instructions for authors, Abstracting and Indexing services that cover the article, special announcements and much more. Each article is published in high quality full-text XML in addition to PDF. A separate De Gruyter department is responsible for continually developing XML standards and assuring process quality.

In the modern academic and professional publishing landscape it’s not enough to simply publish your journal article. You need to work with academic publishers who will make sure that your article reaches its target audience.

Learn more about our discovery services and how they make your journal article more accessible to researchers, authors, librarians and the public.

In 2021, we began rebuilding our online platform to improve user experience. The various improvements and innovations were recognised when we received the Best Publisher User Experience Award from OpenAthens, an award that recognises a publisher’s efforts “to put users at the heart of their service design”.

The key component of our service is to provide each journal with a sophisticated electronic content hosting and distribution platform. The electronic version of the journal is provided with a sleek, professional and user-friendly interface thanks to the platform’s numerous functionalities, such as:

• Automatic creation of active reference links

• Automatic delivery of abstracts to abstracting databases

• Easy integration with library systems and user authentication

• The possibility to publish single articles online as they are finalized (rather than having to wait for issue compilation).

Helping researchers find, use and share content

Some of the key functions of our website that help researchers find, use and share content are shown below:

• Advanced Search: Our platform provides cutting-edge search services backed by an XML datastore. Quick search and advanced search both provide full support for searching the text using Boolean operators, wildcards and quoted phrases. Advanced search extends the search capabilities to a rich, extensible set of metadata

• Cite/Export: Users can share, email, and save content, and can easily capture citations in either MLA, Chicago or other formats 

• Linked citations: Cited papers are linked to via DOIs and Google Scholar.

Marketing activities would be centered around driving usage and visibility of the journal’s content. Hosted on De Gruyter’s new, innovative website featuring cutting-edge data-led content provision to customers, your article would enjoy:

• A dedicated homepage (English/German) presenting all key information about the journal, assisting authors in submitting articles and helping readers find relevant content

• One-click access to content in all issues and volumes

• Discoverability of content:

• Search Engine Optimized (SEO) programming of the journal pages and website, making finding relevant content quicker and more efficient

• Table of Contents and abstracts

• Different search options within the content

• Various options to cite the content and export citations

• Informational landing pages specifically developed to address the needs of different target groups (e.g. authors, librarians, trade customers) and topics of particular interest (e.g. repository policy, Open Access, etc.)

• Page views and most downloaded articles highlighted to provide insights about the most popular content (with a new reporting tool coming soon)

• Temporary Free Access offering of select journal articles from each annual volume for promotional purposes

• Special campaigns offering trail free online content to specific user groups in order to promote usage, visibility and reach of the journal.

With accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, our social media landscape is as diverse as the communities that we target with our activities. Overall, we reach more than 35,000 users each month on social media.

We place special emphasis on Twitter as an academic communications hub, and we are increasingly using it as a resource for communicating with our authors and readers alike. We currently have more than 15 Twitter accounts, each targeting a specific academic community. Our content stands out due to its ability to give users knowledgeable information about both our program and about academic debates.

To make your article visible among scholarly communities, we use targeted advertisements to reach the right audiences on social media.

Not only do we issue press releases, “like” contributions on Facebook, or re-tweet information already issued, but we also use all the tools at our disposal to ensure that the information has a much higher likelihood of reaching wider audiences.

We maintain our own healthy database of writers at national and regional dailies and weeklies as well as those in the digital media in several major countries, and use various dissemination tools for scientific content such as EurekAlert:

• For different topics/societies

• For different subject areas, on the blog De Gruyter Conversations (launched in 2017)

• Supporting authors to maximize their research impact via Author guides which help authors to promote their own content and be champions of their own research

• Marketing campaigns covering different target groups (librarians, academics, trade) and different purposes (sales, usage, author acquisition)

• Global marketing representatives in Boston, Berlin and Beijing

Abstracting and indexing (A&I) services use metadata and abstracts to make journal articles easier to find. Due to the large amount of available online academic literature, it is necessary to have a tool that fulfils this need. A&I services play a key role in helping authors and researchers stay up-to-date on new documents and data.

Another way A&I services make your article more discoverable is by ensuring that it is distributed more widely. The more your article is indexed across different services, the more likely it is to be accessed through library databases. This immediately increases the reach of your article, especially given the fact that different A&I services will focus on slightly different audiences.

Many academic journal publishers make use of A&I services. For the benefit of the authors and readers who work with us, De Gruyter has partnered with the majority of A&I services and continues to look for new A&I services to further extend its reach.

Some of the A&I services we use include:

• Scopus (Elsevier)

• Google Scholar

• Specialised databases, such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest

• Subject area specific services, such as CAS SciFinder, Index Theologicus and PubMed

• Open access publications services, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals.

A well-written and -researched article is not going to have much impact if it’s published in a journal that potential audiences don’t know about. This is why journal impact factor (JIF) is an important element to consider when promoting your work. JIF, a metric compiled by the analytics company Clarivate, shows how many citations a journal has received over a two-year period. Our A&I specialists and journal editors ensure that journals are of the highest quality before submitting them to Clarivate.

Providing researchers and institutions with a quick way to gain access to content was an important part of the development of our new platform, and we achieved this by introducing automatic access. This means that our system can recognise your digital identity in a number of ways, such as your computer’s IP address, which site you came from, or through Shibboleth or OpenAthens logins.

Automatic access was also improved through De Gruyter’s extensive network of collaborating institutions and universities. Users from affiliated research institutions can automatically access licensed content without specifically logging in to the De Gruyter platform.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Google and other search engines is key to potential readers finding your work online. All aspects of SEO improve rankings of digital content in search engines and help to grow organic traffic. De Gruyter optimises its journal pages to ensure that our published content achieves high search engine rankings and that it appears on the first page of results.

SEO ENHANCEMENTS

The way we achieved this is by:

• Redirecting all journal pages affected by DOI changes to pass on historical SEO value and maintaining ranking/traffic levels

• Implementing page loading, URL and geo-targeting changes to ensure that search engines can see all German/other non-English language content and which country/language each page is targeting

• Changing how URLs are generated in order to ensure that they are not case sensitive so that pages can be accessed regardless of uppercase or lowercase usage, and to make sure that all external incoming links work

• Structuring data additions/improvements to improve search engines’ understanding of content and improve matching search queries

• Making abstracts behind a paywall visible in order to assist with competitive search performance

• Implementing image ‘alternative text’ to ensure that journal cover images can be indexed and that screen reader users are catered for

• Sitemapping updates implemented to ensure that all links to journal pages are included

• Adding new pages and navigation menu items specifically for journal authors

• Adding ‘Core Web Vitals’ improvements sitewide

Discovery services allow authors, researchers and libraries to search for content aggregated from different sources. They provide an effective alternative to publishers’ platforms as journal content from a variety of publishers – collected and stored in one digital location – is made accessible via a consistent interface and format.

De Gruyter partners with several discovery services, including:

• WorldCat Discovery

• Knowledge E

• Yewno

• Proquest

We also make our collections available in the WorldCat knowledge base.

De Gruyter works with authors to create content on a variety of different topics for our blog De Gruyter Conversations. This blog, which we launched in 2017, is focused on insightful content on current topics, discussions and debates and caters for intellectual audiences from around the world.

In order to promote your article, you can rewrite your journal article in a simpler and easier form for our blog in order to promote it and increase awareness about your existing body of work.

OUTREACH SERVICES FOR AUTHORS

We offer a variety of ways for authors to share their articles online. These outreach services include:

• Our blog, De Gruyter Conversations

• Various dissemination tools for scientific content, such as EurekAlert

• Author guides which help authors promote their own content and research

• Marketing campaigns covering different target groups, such as librarians and academics and different purposes, such as sales, usage and author acquisition

• Global marketing representatives in Boston, Berlin and Beijing

Do you have questions about the discovery services we offer or are you looking for additional advice on how to promote your article with De Gruyter? Contact us for more information on either of these subjects.