Publicizing Your Work

You disseminate your work through presentations at meetings, through scholarly publications, through invited talks at other institutions. You may write popular articles. You may well have a web page and even a blog. (If you want help in setting these up, please ask me. There are easy cost-free ways of doing this nicely.) And I am sure you send out preprints or offprints or electronic files to colleagues elsewhere, as well as the ssrn network or arXiv. In general, we work much harder at doing our work and writing it up, than in making sure it is appreciated more widely. As you must be aware, publication is only the beginning of having your work become impactful, and often it is the last move, your having given talks about the work at various institutions and received comments from audiences so making the published work much stronger. (We all read the acknowledgements in papers, where the venues are listed, the useful readers mentioned, etc. This is part of an implicit claim thatthis paper is important.)

As I have mentioned before, I have been doing brief podcasts for Academic Minute. They offer me a chance to give an "elevator speech" to a bigger audience, so to speak. Actually, I have no idea of the size of their audience. For me, the value lies in my being forced to say it all in about 1'40", something like 275 words. You might consider this venue. I am sure there are other venues that are better. Think of this a way of focusing your thinking. I have placed below a link to my podcasts.

Just for those of you who think all of this is vulgar self-promotion: I know of no distinguished scholars who do not engage in publicizing their work, often shamelessly so. (It's not the self-promotion that makes them distinguished, it is the work itself. Lots of scholars who are excellent at promotion may not achieve distinction because their work is not so strong.) They are telling the scholarly community of their research, and that community, by definition, should be interested in advances and improvements. There are no quiet geniuses, as far as I know. (Even the scholars who are recluses make sure that the "right people" know of their work, and know that those right people will publicize it. If they don't formally publish, they send out working papers. On the other hand, unpublished articles and books, especially if they are longstanding, are dismissed unless you have a very distinguished list of previous publications.)

MK

Here are some of my podcasts:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/06/30/academic-minute-sounds-city?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c3d228de60-DNU20160630&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c3d228de60-198214817