How to get published research covered by science magazines so as to promote the research among the community?

Question

I am a researcher in the early stage of my career with a few publications. I work on High Energy Physics and published papers in top ranked journals with relatively high h-index. My query is regarding how to promote my research among other researchers working in the same field.

I often read various science magazines like Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News, etc. where articles are published that summarize research papers. Naturally, this makes their research stand out from the crowd. I want to know whether our research can be covered by such magazines, too, provided the research is fundamental and important to the community. If this is possible, I would like to know how to approach the editors or science journalists to get our research covered by them.

Answer 1

There may be better ways to promote your research to other researchers (i.e., ResearchGate, specialty Listservs, Science Twitter, etc.). However, if you want to have articles in popular science magazines, here are a few options that come to mind.

• Reach out to writers of those magazine articles and see if they would be interested in writing about your work. However, have an idea in mind on how you'd frame it for the general public. You need a hook. A "so what". In some instances, the writers are freelancers, so they may also have suggestions for alternative magazines. (They often shop articles to multiple magazines.)

• You could consider submitting your own article if you find a magazine open to submissions. But again, you need to be able to sell your science. It should have relevance and interest to the general public. Consider co-authoring an article with someone with clout to get it in front of the right people.

• Work with your communications office (if you are affiliated with an institution) to send out press releases.

• Apply to do a Ted talk. Some universities host these, and others have open calls to audition for an event. Even if you don't make it to the final round of presenting to the live audience, it is still good practice in public speaking and the judges may pass your name and topic off to other friends in the scicomm community that could touch base with you later for articles and the like.

• Maintain a social media presence. Documentarians from Plimsoll Productions to Nat Geo monitor Facebook pages and Instagram accounts for their upcoming docuseries. If your work matches what their next show is going to be about, you could get cold-called to be a featured scientists. I've been approached this way for two docuseries and two podcasts.

• Finally, give interesting talks with catchy titles at conferences. I've been approached for multiple magazine articles at major conferences that way.

Good luck!

I hope others weigh in on this too. It's a great question.

Answer 2

Make your journal articles available in easy to digest formats (e.g. video abstracts, web stories, blog entries), and then publicize those. In addition to your organizations communications team, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. are all your friend in getting the word out.

I agree with @Angie_Zorka's suggestions as well, and support following and reaching out to science writers who regularly cover topics related to your research.

Answer 3

Sorry to be a bit of a downer but there must be 1000s if not more people in your situation. It is one of the biggest challenge of any researcher to get their results to “breakout”.

Try to get on the seminar circuit. One way is to invite people to where you work so they get to know your stuff, and might invite you back at their place later on, especially if the discussions around the seminar or colloquium was productive.

Get involved in APS. This will help with name recognition, and (hopefully) academic recognition will follow.

Go to conferences: it shouldn’t be this way but if you don’t promote your own stuff nobody will hear about it.