Much of the scholarly publishing sector’s debate around generative AI has focused on how it is used by authors upstream of submission. But generative AI also presents a lot of opportunities downstream of publication. We’ve been working with some of our publisher partners recently to explore how generative AI can help to build readership and author satisfaction.
Generative AI can help categorize and summarize publications, making it much quicker, easier, and more feasible to create clusters of content that address emerging information needs – in line with news articles, high search volumes, awareness days, major conferences and other thematic activities throughout the year.
Summary content helps researchers more quickly triage the literature, because it’s easier to scan a wider range of content and determine the relevance or significance for their own research. Summaries also help researchers in adjacent fields to understand and make use of research across disciplinary boundaries. And summaries help broader audiences find, understand and act on or benefit from research publications.
Generating summary content and clustering it into topical Showcases increases readership, citations and discussion. Our analysis shows that articles that have been summarized and promoted via Showcases and related campaigns benefit from 7.5 x higher citations, 4 x higher views, and 23 x higher Altmetric scores. (Comparing content in Kudos knowledge cooperatives to other content from the same timeframe that has been added to Kudos but not explained or shared).
Did you know: We’ve added a range of sponsorship / advertising panels to Kudos Showcases so as well as driving engagement with your content, you can also use them to build your brand in key research areas, attract submissions, promote events, publish calls for papers, generate webinar downloads, and drive traffic to other initiatives.
Topical Showcasing offers a substantial opportunity to scale the audiences for research publications – helping to curate content for busy academics, for researchers in other sectors, and for wider stakeholder audiences. Aligning Showcases with topics that have high search volume, i.e. that are being regularly searched for on sites like Google, helps you signpost authoritative content and increase visibility via search engines.
It can be difficult to keep up with the news cycle, and to pick out which of the articles or books you have published fit with emerging topics – and which have sufficient relevance or appeal to merit ‘premium’ publicity, perhaps via a video or infographic to support showcasing and communications. You can use keyword tools to gauge the level of interest in a topic, and then combine automated and manual approaches to categorising your content against the most popular. (If this all sounds a bit complicated, talk to us about how our expert team can help!)
Once you’ve identified themes around which you can cluster and promote your publications, generative AI is an exciting new way to create a ‘critical mass’ of summaries and visuals with which to expand your audience.
One of the concerns around generative AI is validating the quality of its output. You need to moderate and approve the content – either in house, via your authors, or via a partner. We’ve been working with Cactus Labs to generate plain language summaries (read more about the process by which we do this), and authors can use our existing Kudos toolkit to review and edit the copy we create. For publishers, tapping into this existing Kudos / Cactus set up can be a low-effort way to experiment with generative AI, while maintaining control, ensuring quality, and involving authors.
Kudos showcasing, promotion and SEO activities, plus our ready-made audience of 500,000 researchers, helps content convert to results. Our first tranche of AI-generated content has already generated over 1,000 views on the Kudos platform. Article views are 60 x higher than other content loaded during the same period but for which no summaries exist. Author engagement still guarantees the highest level of usage – where authors were active, views were 12 x higher again. This is great as it provides a continued incentive and benefit for authors to keep engaging with their published articles (and their publishers!) post-publication. AI summaries are clearly driving discoverability, and as our author feedback shows, authors hugely appreciate it when publishers give them a head start in communicating their research.