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Of course, the best way to improve citations is to write good papers which presents sound, interesting, and important results.

However, assuming that one has a nice paper published in an important journal (e.g., PRL, or PRB), what one can do to improve citations, and in general to make people read, or at least aware of, the paper? A partial answer is to upload it on the arXiv, and presents the work to relevant conferences on the topic. Is there something else one can do to advertise a paper, especially online?

PS: I am concerned with hard-sciences, in particular, physics.

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    I have heard decent things about academia.edu, they claim citations are generally higher when they are used as well but no idea if the claims are valid. I've never used it personally.
    – Ricky Mutschlechner
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 16:14
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    I suspect the best way is to engage in discussions of the topic of your paper on blogs/forums, where it would be perfectly natural to mention your paper. That also has the advantage of getting the information to the people most likely to cite it (because it will be useful for them).
    – Dikran Marsupial
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 16:22
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    @DikranMarsupial Blogs and forums are usually not read by people in academia, to my knowledge. Or maybe are there some more specialistic research-level forums/blogs out there?
    – sintetico
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 16:29
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    @RickyMutschlechner I have great cynicism about the academia.edu study; see caveats here - scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2015/05/18/…
    – Andrew is gone
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 16:53
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    "How to advertise a paper to increase citations?". By writing more quality papers that build on this paper and cite it.
    – Alexandros
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 19:36

2 Answers 2

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Aside from giving excellent talks at important conferences, here are several other ideas. I've seen all of these work (although rarely all for the same paper).

  • Maintain a freely available copy (or at least an arXiv link) on your personal web page.

  • Keep your CV up to date, including links to freely available version of all your papers.

  • Make sure Google Scholar and similar indexing services are indexing your paper.

  • Announce / brag about your paper on social media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, LiveJournal, etc.

  • If you have pages at clickbait sites like Academia.org or ResearchGate, upload copies (of the arXiv version) there. (But if you don't, don't start now.)

  • Write a blog post about your paper. Better yet, convince someone else with a well-read blog to write a blog post about your paper.

  • Give invited talks about your work at other universities/labs. If necessary, invite yourself.

  • If you are a student, ask your advisor to brag about your new paper.

  • If your paper significantly extends the work of other authors, or applies it in a novel way, contact those authors directly with a link to (a free version of) your paper. (But don't send a copy to someone just because you cite them.)

  • Whenever your paper provides an answer to a question on (for example) physics.stackexchange, answer the question and include a link to your paper.

  • Develop a reputation for stellar work, so that people in your field regularly check your web page / arXiv / indexes / journals for your newest papers.

The last method is by far the most effective.

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    +1 for "Develop a reputation for stellar work, so that people in your field regularly check your web page...". Similary, I "subscribe" to the Google Scholar profile of people that do great work in my area of interest so that I am notified by Google whenever they publish a new paper.
    – cabad
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 14:22
  • I suspect most of these methods have such tiny benefit that they are not worth the effort. But some are very important. Which?
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Commented Oct 7, 2020 at 7:48
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    @AnonymousPhysicist First, develop a reputation for stellar work. Second, make your work freely and easily available. Third, talk about your work in public (in whatever way works best for you).
    – JeffE
    Commented Oct 7, 2020 at 17:06
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Go to conferences and give talks that describe the results in the paper, giving the citation as part of your slides. In disciplines where conferences are not primary publication venues, there's no real worry about the conference paper duplicating the journal article because there's usually no conference paper at all. There are plenty of big conferences that have no proceedings and talks are accepted by review of abstracts only. I don't know if this is how physics works, but in computational mechanics, it's the norm.

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  • Yes, present the work to conferences is of course an important way to advertise a paper, as I said in the question. I asked explicitly about other way to do it, e.g., online.
    – sintetico
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 16:49
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    I think your answer is not an answer to my question
    – sintetico
    Commented Jul 30, 2015 at 17:18

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