What to do after your paper acceptance: a quick start on academic marketing

Congratulations on your paper acceptance!!! 🎉 My very first suggestion on what to do now is — celebrate! 🙌 You worked so hard on this and now it’s time to enjoy the victory!

Then what? You should share this great news with the world! aka. academic marketing ;) As academics, publishing papers is NOT the end, but the means. Our job, to put simply, is to help (whoever your target audience is). In my main research community Software Engineering, we mostly help software developers. In your field, you might be helping the general public, or wild animals, or our environment, and so on. This is all great! But… What’s the point of working so hard to solve a problem but nobody knows you have the solution? In other words, you gotta market your papers!

Some people have mixed feelings about marketing. But not only do I think it’s important, I also think we should treat it as the “first-class citizen” and bring it into our research lifecycle. Seriously, treat it as part of your research job too. Don’t feel bad that you’re not doing research research when marketing. You ARE! At the end of the day, nobody can remember how many papers your have published so far, but what matters is the impact you have on this world. So again, you need to tell the world what you did in order to have an impact! Professor Amy J. Ko has this great advice on impact: “think beyond researchers. Who in the world needs to know that your work exists and how can you get their attention?”. You can find more at the “Impact Requirement” on her lab’s onboarding document (lots of other great stuff too!).

While there’s a lot more to academic marketing, my particular focus in this article is a quick start for those who are new to this. I will list marketing opportunities in academia that I can think of for you to choose from. I will also share some practical tips and resources. The reason I’m doing this is because I found myself repeating these tips whenever my labmates get their papers accepted. Most PhD students underestimate the importance of marketing, or are not aware of many opportunities out there (which BTW, can largely help your career building too :)). So there you go! This article acts as a “table of content”, and you can decide where to go based on your own needs. Let’s get started!

1. Social Media
   Professor Vijay Chidambaram recently talked about academic marketing on social media (Twitter thread), so I won’t repeat. There are tips on how to craft the content as well. Check it out!

Professor Vijay Chidambaram’s Twitter thread about being on social media as an academic

Pro tip💡 Don’t forget to mention (@) the conference where your paper got accepted for more visibility. They might like/retweet your post and they usually have more followers. :)

A side note: If you’re ever serving as the publicity chair for a conference, social media management tool (e.g., Buffer, Hootsuite) is your best friend! Scheduling posts in advance (e.g., deadline reminders) will save your life ;)

2. arXiv.org
When your pre-print is ready, I highly recommend uploading it to arXiv due to its open access. Note that not everyone has free access to ACM/IEEE digital libraries etc like academics, but they (e.g., software developers in industry) might benefit from your work and this can sometimes lead to collaboration opportunities!

Pro tip💡 I always link to the arXiv version of my paper due to its open access (e.g., on my website, when I share the pre-print on social media).

3. Conference Website — Paper Page
My background is in Computer Science, and our conference websites get lots of visibility (e.g., people go there to check accepted papers). Many people don’t know they can actually edit that website on their own (if your conference uses conf.researchr.org). After you’re added as an author for your paper on the conference’s website, you have the edit permission to update your paper’s detail page. An example of my ESEC/FSE 2020 paper’s detail page is shown below, where I added the pre-print, artifacts, presentations, etc.

My paper’s detail page on ESEC/FSE 2020’s website: tinyurl.com/fruiter

Pro tip💡 Not only do conference websites have more visibility, but now you also have one place to point to that has everything about your paper (if you don’t have your own website for your paper). During your paper presentation, you can just share one link to redirect people to learn more. I recommend using a readable tiny url for this all-in-one link (e.g., I used tinyurl.com/fruiter to redirect to my FrUITeR paper’s conference website). Some people use a QR code for this.

4. Conference Website — Profile Page

Don’t forget to update your profile page on the conference website too. You should at least have a proper profile picture, affiliation, your website, and research interests. People might go to your profile to see what other papers you have at the conference. An example of my ESEC/FSE 2020 profile is shown below.

My ESEC/FSE 2020 profile page on the conference website: https://2020.esec-fse.org/profile/yixuezhao

5. Project Website

I already mentioned the benefits of having one place with everything about your paper. Besides the conference website, you can build your own website to do this. This would give you more flexibility in terms of content and format. Sometimes, one project can lead to multiple papers, so this project website can also help promote all your related papers. An example of FrUITeR’s website is shown below.

FrUITeR’s website: https://felicitia.github.io/FrUITeR/

Pro tip💡 Speaking of FrUITeR (my ESEC/FSE 2020 paper that I’m using as an example throughout), I think having a name for your work is a good idea. It’s easier for people to remember and discuss (both in casual conversations and in their papers when mentioning your work).

6. Artifacts

As Open Science is getting bigger and bigger (hooray!), you should always share your artifacts in public (unless there are reasons for not doing so). Many conferences started to adopt the Open Science policy (e.g., see ICSE 2022’s CFP), meaning they require you to submit your artifacts during your paper submission, or specify the reason for not doing so. During an Open Science panel at ICSE 2019, I heard that in one company (and there could be other companies too), they skip papers that don’t have artifacts available. This simply limits your work’s impact in industry. Popular platforms for hosting your artifacts are figshare and Zenodo.

Pro tip💡 Bookmark this detailed guide on “how to disclose data for double-blind review and make it archived open data upon acceptance”.

7. Blog

Guess what? In addition to your paper, you can also write a blog post about it! This should target a broader audience who may not be able to understand or have the time to read your long technical paper. Some conferences encourage the authors to do so, and publish them on blog platforms (e.g., ASE’s Medium blog).

A side note: I understand that writing blog posts can take some effort and I myself actually never had the chance to do this for my papers (because I also underestimated the importance of marketing earlier in my PhD, and also because I published my first paper really late so I felt the urgency to move on to publish more in order to graduate). What I ended up doing is to make my paper presentations accessible to a broader audience and share the recordings in public (e.g., my past conference talks can be found on YouTube: tinyurl.com/yixuetalks). If you have the time, writing blog is a great way to boost the visibility of your work! As mentioned earlier, you should treat this as part of your research time too. It can have long-lasting benefits!

8. Talk to People

Yes! You can also talk to people! I recently learned this indirectly from Professor Amy J. Ko (my “spy” at Grad Cohort shared this with me :)). You can directly talk to or email people to share your paper if it’s related to their field. It’s not awkward. If it’s related to their work, I’m sure they’ll appreciate it!

A side note: If you don’t know what Grad Cohort is, check out my blog on “Fellowship/Travel Grants/Workshop Opportunities for Ph.D. Students in EECS”.

9. University Publicity

Did you know your department has a publicity person who’s eager to share your paper acceptance too? I didn’t know this earlier in my PhD, and I just thought some papers are so much better than mine and even attracted the university’s attention... Until one day, I asked a friend how did they publish such a great paper that attracted the university’s attention? The answer is — you gotta contact the publicity person yourself to get a press article out! The publicity person is very busy, and they simply can’t track all the achievements in your department. So make their jobs easier by contacting them! Ask your advisor on how to do this properly (usually the advisor should be the one to send the initial email).

10. Other Media Coverage

There are also other media outlets out there where you can publicize your work, e.g., ACM TechNews for Computer Science. I don’t have experience with this one, and different outlets might have different protocols. But I just want to bring this up so that you know it’s also an option!

11. Give Talks

By default, you will at least give one talk of your accepted conference paper. This is a marketing opportunity for free and you should totally take advantage of it. ;) I can’t emphasize enough that a good talk goes a long way! In another article on “How to get the most out of your first research conference” (under “3. Be Ready for Your Presentation”), I gave more examples on why a good talk is important. It will increase your visibility and you might be invited to give more talks in various places (more impact yay 🙌)!

A side note: Most of my invited talks are invited by my friends who I met at the conferences. It usually started after my presentation, and some people would approach me with questions about my research, or sometimes even how I did certain animations in my talk, etc. Then I keep in touch with some of them, and we become friends, or even co-authors! This works both ways. Don’t hesitate to approach to people after their talks too!

Final words

This articles aims to provide a table of content so that you know what’s out there. You should do what’s best for you based on the stage in your career, what’s on your plate, and what your current top priorities are, etc. For instance, the FrUITeR ESEC/FSE 2020 paper I’m using as an example throughout this article happened at a time where I had more time (and I knew I had enough papers to graduate, finally lol). Not all my papers has a website or detailed instructions like that. So just do what you’re comfortable with and this process should be fun! You’re sharing cool stuff with the world and you should be proud! 😎

Congrats on your paper acceptance again, and happy marketing! 📣