Industry Buzz: People are talking about TrendMD

It’s always a pleasant surprise to receive unsolicited acknowledgement that your product is increasingly recognized as a standard of the industry. This recent article in The Scholarly Kitchen, by Christos Petrou, founder and Chief Analyst at Scholarly Intelligence, analyzed the changing fortunes of the megajournals PLOS ONE, Scientific Reports, and a few others. His perspective, as an analyst evaluating the publishers’ return on investment, reinforced the point that the business of scholarly publishing is looking more and more like commercial publishing, especially with respect to the importance of marketing and branding in the ultimate sustainability of the journal. When faced with the need to turn around a trend of reduced submissions and declining Journal Impact Factors, he suggests, “Highly capable marketing teams or specialized marketing tools such as TrendMD might make the difference.”

Obviously, we at TrendMD couldn’t agree more! In fact, we have the data to show that he is correct. This study, published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, documented the results of a 12-month randomized controlled trial that demonstrated how articles promoted through TrendMD achieved a 50% increase in mean citations relative to control. 3,200 articles, randomly selected from the top 20 journals in 5 subject categories, were tracked over the 12 months, with half of them (1,600) promoted through the TrendMD recommendations service in our network of 4,300 participating journals. (Since the study was completed, the network has grown to more than 5,000 journals.)

In another recent blog article, Where Physicians Really Go on the Internet- And How Best to Reach Them, Cassie Stox, Senior Director, Media Strategy for healthcare marketing agency MedThink, mentioned TrendMD as a tool marketers can use to promote sponsored content on educational sites frequented by healthcare specialists. Sponsored articles appear in the TrendMD recommendations widget within the context of the typical reading workflow, enabling marketers to reach their targeted audiences when they are most receptive. Individuals can be targeted by geographic location, institutional affiliation, or healthcare specialty.

It’s a good sign that we must be doing something right, when marketers and scholarly publishing industry analysts mention TrendMD as a key part of the marketing strategies and tools they use and recommend!