For immediate release, March 11th, 2019 –– Kudos (www.growkudos.com), the award-winning service for accelerating research impact through strategic communications management, has enhanced its free service for authors with the addition of a new “featured image” capability. Images help to increase traffic1 and engagement2, and make pages more engaging and memorable for readers3. The new feature is enabled by an integration with Unsplash, a free image bank that provides a wide range of stock photography. Over 500 publication profile pages in Kudos have already been enhanced through the addition of featured images; a random sample of twenty showed that page views had increased by an average of 23% following the addition of the featured image.
Views of Dr Michele Tobias' profile page for her 2014 article 'California foredune plant biogeomorphology' have increased by 35% since she added a featured image.Researchers can quickly and easily add a photo to their publication profile in Kudos by searching the Unsplash database from within Kudos. They can select either an abstract image, or one that is thematically appropriate for their work. The chosen image is then presented alongside the plain language title and summary that authors create and disseminate via Kudos, to increase the reach and impact potential of their work. Images are credited to the photographer and Unsplash.
Featured images are also incorporated in Kudos’ Shareable PDFs, which are used by authors to measure dissemination of their work via scholarly collaboration networks, and – uniquely – to compare this with other communications channels such as email, social media or events.
“We know that one of the key challenges researchers face is making their work stand out in an age of information overload,” says David Sommer, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Kudos. “It is also well known that images are more readily recalled, so being able to capture people’s attention with an image can help make your work not only more engaging and attractive, but also more memorable. Feedback from authors during our testing phase for this new feature has confirmed that not only is it quick and easy to add an image to your work – it’s also something that researchers really value being able to do.”
For examples of featured images already added to their summaries by researchers using Kudos, see our top 10:
- “Basic stats with SPSS” – James Smith & Clive Larson (2016) Statistical approaches in surface finishing. Part 1. Introductory review and parametric hypothesis testing, Transactions of the IMF, 94:6, 288-293, doi: 10.1080/00202967.2016.1232851
- “California's coastal plants build sand dunes through teamwork” – Michele M. Tobias (2015) California foredune plant biogeomorphology, Physical Geography, 36:1, 19-33, doi: 10.1080/02723646.2014.966224
- “Cold enhances cancer. Bad news for "cold" countries?” – Konstantinos Voskarides (2019). The “cancer–cold” hypothesis and possible extensions for the Nordic populations. Scandinavian Journal of Public Health. doi:10.1177/1403494819831905
- “Gendered discourses in coaching in sport” – Donna de Haan and Annelies Knoppers (2019). Gendered discourses in coaching high-performance sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. doi:10.1177/1012690219829692
- “Grade skippers earn more money in adulthood” – Russell T. Warne (2017) Possible economic benefits of full-grade acceleration, Journal of School Psychology, 65, 54-68, doi:10.1016/j.jsp.2017.07.001.
- “Hawaiian tree snails use chemical communication in order to find one another for reproduction” – Brenden S. Holland, Marianne Gousy-Leblanc and Joanne Y. Yew (2018), Strangers in the dark: behavioral and biochemical evidence for trail pheromones in Hawaiian tree snails. Invertebr Biol, 137: 124-132. doi:10.1111/ivb.12211
- “Importance of Board characteristics on firms” – Hernán Herrera-Echeverri, Sandra Gaitan, Luis Antonio Orozco & Nidia Soto-Echeverry (2018) Board Characteristics, Compliance, and Firm Performance: Empirical Findings from Colombia, Latin American Business Review, 19:3-4, 263-295, doi:10.1080/10978526.2018.1540935
- “Language development in study abroad: The effects of living with a family versus in a dormitory” – Angela George (2019). Study abroad homestay versus dormitory. Spanish in Context, 16:1, 77–103. doi: 10.1075/sic.00027.geo
- “Ostracizing targets of workplace sexual harassment before and after the #MeToo movement” – Stephanie E.V. Brown, Jericka S. Battle, (2019) "Ostracizing targets of workplace sexual harassment before and after the #MeToo movement", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, doi:10.1108/EDI-09-2018-0162
- “Skin reaction to ingredients of a wound care product” – Ana Jaque, Joel G. DeKoven (2017), Polyhexamethylene biguanide and alkyl glucosides: unexpected allergens in an antimicrobial foam dressing. Contact Dermatitis, 77: 421-422. doi:10.1111/cod.12852
1 Caleb Gonsalves. Skyword Study: Add Images to Improve Content Performance. Skyword Inc, 2012. https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/marketing/skyword-study-add-images-to-improve-content-performance/
2 Twitter internal data ("people are three times more likely to engage with Tweets that contain videos and photos"), correlated by Track Maven and Buffer; Dan Zarrella's analysis of 400,000 tweets showed that "Tweets with images uploaded to pic.Twitter.com were nearly twice as likely to be retweeted" (99% confidence interval).
3 Marc Marschark and Cesare Cornoldi. "Imagery and verbal memory." Imagery and cognition. Springer, New York, NY, 1991. 133-182.
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Contact:
Charlie Rapple • charlie.a.rapple@growkudos.com • +44 1865 872527
About Kudos
Over 275,000 researchers have signed up to use Kudos’ free platform for managing communications around their publications – across multiple publishers and tools. They explain work in plain language and generate trackable links for sharing via email, web and social networks; these enable communications to be directly mapped against views, downloads, altmetrics and citations. Kudos thereby provides researchers, and their publishers and institutions, with a rich understanding of which channels and activities are most effective for broadening reach and impact. Kudos has over 100 publisher, institutional, society and corporate customers around the world. Recent analysis of Kudos data indicates that growth in full text downloads on the publisher site is 23% higher when the Kudos toolkit is used. Kudos won the 2015 ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing and has been named in Outsell’s “Ten to Watch” for three consecutive years; Outsell recently assigned a “positive” rating to Kudos’ new “shareable PDF, describing it as a “a pragmatic solution to a key industry issue”.
