How to grow the reach of your scholarly articles by 87%

There are now greater than 5,000 new peer-reviewed articles published across over 27,000 online journals, daily. With all this new content and competition for attention, what's your plan to ensure your publications get the visibility necessary for generating impact?

In case you missed it, here are 7 strategies that can help. One strategy that stood out to us: Kudos is a cool new tool for authors; using their sharing tools, authors saw a 19% higher downloads for their published work. Over the next few months, we plan on A/B testing all of the strategies we listed in our post to see which one yields the best bang for your buck.

First on our list to test: how does TrendMD affect readership? But before we dig into the data, here is some background info on what we do:

Using personalized links, TrendMD now recommends over nine million scholarly articles to two million readers per month, via a free content recommendation widget being piloted across a network of hundreds of premium STM journals and blogs, such as The BMJ, Landes Bioscience (Taylor & Francis), and the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Publishers, authors, and funders use TrendMD’s distribution network to grow their audience and ultimately drive more impact. Using machine learning algorithms based on contextual targeting, user click behavior, and personalization (i.e. cookies) we intelligently distribute your scholarly content to the right audience.

We ran a 6-week pilot across the TrendMD network to answer our key question: how does cross-publisher distribution of article links over the TrendMD network affect readership?

To do so, TrendMD completed a trial of 100 articles published on the Journal of Medical Internet Research. 50 articles were distributed and 50 articles remained undistributed. Articles that were distributed across the network received an average of 191 views, whereas those that had no distribution received 102 views.

This 87% increase in article views also resulted in an overall 2-4% increase in daily new referral traffic to those journals that had their article links distributed.

We are definitely very pleased to see our early data indicating that distributing articles over the TrendMD network can lead to dramatic increases in article views. And it gets better. As the number of websites with the TrendMD widget continues to grow, we will be able to distribute scholarly content to even larger audiences. And through our recommendation technology, TrendMD will always work to find the people in that audience who are most engaged, and most interested to consume that content.

Moving forward, we are now testing to determine how distribution over the TrendMD network affects other metrics such as altmetrics and citations.

If you’re someone reading this who wants to get your scholarly content in front of a larger, and more targetd audience, sign up for an invitation to submit to the TrendMD network today by visiting TrendMD. We offer a trial free period to all authors.

Alternatively, if you’re a publisher or blogger, contact paul@trendmd.com to find out how you can easily add the free TrendMD widget to your site and start increasing your traffic and revenue overnight!