How do we “get the word out” about a new paper we have published, whether the focus is scientific or pedagogical?  We list the citation on our CV’s and perhaps on our faculty page of a department website.  We might send copies to collaborators and colleagues at other institutions.  And some of us will use social media to share the news of having a new manuscript released. Social science researchers in the UK state that to be well-cited and well-regarded academically, researchers should not be “academic hermits” but utilize tools such as Google Scholar Citations, Research Gate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and LinkedIn to increase the reach and accessibility of their work.

But is there a need to find new, online tools to aid with dissemination of our work? Take this citation analysis report of scientific papers:

Ouch! “90% of publications in academic journals never cited; 50% never read by anyone but author, editor & reviewers http://t.co/l15W6lOqtm”

— Britt Koskella (@bkoskella) March 24, 2014

Here’s one solution… some journals are now encouraging authors to create short video summaries of their work to aid with dissemination.  In fact, for over a dozen academic publishers, it is an accepted practice.

Publishers are hoping that video abstracts will extend the reach of the research, that by viewing a video on YouTube or on a journal website, readers will then select to download and read an article.  Although a quick internet search did not yield for me any examples from geoscience journals, video abstracts can be found with the New Journal of Physics and the Journal of Number Theory. To help authors with the creation of this multimedia supplement, publishers such as Dovepress offer guidelines for creating a video abstract.

Believe it or not, a study has already been published by Scott Spicer (Univ. of Minnesota – Twin Cities) titled “Exploring Video Abstracts in Science Journals: An Overview and Case Study.”  You can view his video abstract on video abstracts below.

(Interestingly, this video abstract is much longer than any of the others I have come across – most are 1-4 minutes in length)

I don’t think we are yet at the point of seeing “publish or perish” soon include “video or vanish” (Berkowitz, 2013), and we shouldn’t get hung up on the fact that we would each be challenged to find the time to create a video, that we may not have the technical expertise to create a quality product to best represent our work, etc.  But perhaps we are at the point where video abstracts could enhance our dissemination?  And just perhaps, we can make our scientific contributions even more accessible to our students by using video?  It’s a thought…

Additional sources for exploration

University Affairs (2013). Video abstracts for beginners, posted February 6, 2013. (Article online)

The American Chemical Society Publishing Your Research 101 video series and the video segment Impact of video on scientific articles.

Bastow, S., P. Dunleavy, & J. Tinkler (2014). The Impact of the Social Sciences: How Academics and Their Research Make a Difference. London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 344 pp. (Google Books preview)

Meho, L. (2007, January). The rise and rise of citation analysis. Physics World, pp. 32-36. (PDF online)

Shema, H. (2013). What’s wrong with citation analysis? Information Culture – Scientific American Blogs, posted January 1, 2013. (Blog post)