Question
How can academics increase the visibility of their research?
Answer
The big problem in research is that the main"visibility" tactics only really work after you've already established some visibility. Chicken and egg. So you can divide tactics into "consolidate your position" post-bootstrapping tactics, and "get a position" bootstrapping tactics.
Post-bootstrapping tactics:
1. Do "TV science" (if you can imagine doing a TED talk about it if asked, it is "TV science"). A lot of TV science/engineering is actually extremely conservative, not cutting edge as it appears to be (if you think about it, comprehensibility to a popular imagination practically implies conservatism/maturity)
2. Make your paper ENTIRELY about another well-known paper; solve, clarify, do grunt-work on, challenge (=flamebait) an issue in that paper.
3. Be provocative/funny (this contradict's W. Gunn's advice). This only works if you are already a little established, so your provocation has some credibility behind it. An example is "Prolegomena to any Future Qualitative Physics" by Doyle and Sacks (provoked a flame war in AI)
4. Work on something the public cares about but has no real clue about (example: any "women are as smart as men" research is guaranteed some PR; it is also guaranteed to be misunderstood)
5. Jump on a bandwagon early enough (example, the *nomics stuff that followed freakonomics). The visibility returns for the nth piece of "popular" work in a research field is proportional to 1/(n^2).
For bootstrapping visibility, there are a few things you can do:
1. Solve an obscure and unimportant problem that only interests/can be understood by a few top leaders in your field, and really only helps bolster the pet causes that bolster their reputations, rather than representing any fundamental advance on an actually interesting question. That gets you the connections who will help you amplify and popularize/increase visibility of your "visibility" research. It's a blood-tribute of sorts.
2. Do the networking grunt work: work on mainstream hot topics (including problems that aren't fundamentally difficult, but just require a lot of highly tedious, highly technical work), religiously cite others and hope they cite you back (this is rather like linking/backlinking strategies in blogging), submit ritual offerings at the altars of the gods of your field and make sure they know you've submitted an offering (every academic discipline has a ruling cartel at its heart, that gatekeeps who gets labeled "up and comer" and who is relegated to obscurity; "best young researcher" and "best paper" type awards are the main vehicle, but there are a lot more subtle ways the cartels selectively anoint and promote particular individuals from the younger generation).
3. If possible, of course, work for an "already famous" professor at the start of your career, and ride their coat-tails to visibility.
The alternative to playing these games is extremely simple: do genius work that speaks for itself so loudly you can basically ignore all this crap, and even snub the entire discipline your work belongs in. Like Perelman who toiled in obscurity for years and solved the Poincare conjecture. Do something like that, and you can short-circuit the BS completely. I love the guy. He turned down both the Fields medal and the Millenium prize. Otherwise you have no choice but to play the game. It's the price of mediocrity. If you play it religiously well, you have a slight chance of making it in academia (an extremely oversubscribed world, with a few geniuses writing their own tickets, and a vast number of mediocre people fighting over the few opportunities).
For the record, I used to be among the mediocre, and bailed out of academia because I didn't want to put in the hard work that is the cost of mediocrity.
The entire game is VERY much like blogging, which is one reason I've been able to successfully jump over to blogging :). I like blogging far better because I entered the game early enough that I didn't actually have to play by the rules to do well (and also because I understood the by-the-rules game well enough to know HOW to break it successfully... unlike in academia, in blogging you don't have to be a true genius like Perelman to break out of the game...)
Post-bootstrapping tactics:
1. Do "TV science" (if you can imagine doing a TED talk about it if asked, it is "TV science"). A lot of TV science/engineering is actually extremely conservative, not cutting edge as it appears to be (if you think about it, comprehensibility to a popular imagination practically implies conservatism/maturity)
2. Make your paper ENTIRELY about another well-known paper; solve, clarify, do grunt-work on, challenge (=flamebait) an issue in that paper.
3. Be provocative/funny (this contradict's W. Gunn's advice). This only works if you are already a little established, so your provocation has some credibility behind it. An example is "Prolegomena to any Future Qualitative Physics" by Doyle and Sacks (provoked a flame war in AI)
4. Work on something the public cares about but has no real clue about (example: any "women are as smart as men" research is guaranteed some PR; it is also guaranteed to be misunderstood)
5. Jump on a bandwagon early enough (example, the *nomics stuff that followed freakonomics). The visibility returns for the nth piece of "popular" work in a research field is proportional to 1/(n^2).
For bootstrapping visibility, there are a few things you can do:
1. Solve an obscure and unimportant problem that only interests/can be understood by a few top leaders in your field, and really only helps bolster the pet causes that bolster their reputations, rather than representing any fundamental advance on an actually interesting question. That gets you the connections who will help you amplify and popularize/increase visibility of your "visibility" research. It's a blood-tribute of sorts.
2. Do the networking grunt work: work on mainstream hot topics (including problems that aren't fundamentally difficult, but just require a lot of highly tedious, highly technical work), religiously cite others and hope they cite you back (this is rather like linking/backlinking strategies in blogging), submit ritual offerings at the altars of the gods of your field and make sure they know you've submitted an offering (every academic discipline has a ruling cartel at its heart, that gatekeeps who gets labeled "up and comer" and who is relegated to obscurity; "best young researcher" and "best paper" type awards are the main vehicle, but there are a lot more subtle ways the cartels selectively anoint and promote particular individuals from the younger generation).
3. If possible, of course, work for an "already famous" professor at the start of your career, and ride their coat-tails to visibility.
The alternative to playing these games is extremely simple: do genius work that speaks for itself so loudly you can basically ignore all this crap, and even snub the entire discipline your work belongs in. Like Perelman who toiled in obscurity for years and solved the Poincare conjecture. Do something like that, and you can short-circuit the BS completely. I love the guy. He turned down both the Fields medal and the Millenium prize. Otherwise you have no choice but to play the game. It's the price of mediocrity. If you play it religiously well, you have a slight chance of making it in academia (an extremely oversubscribed world, with a few geniuses writing their own tickets, and a vast number of mediocre people fighting over the few opportunities).
For the record, I used to be among the mediocre, and bailed out of academia because I didn't want to put in the hard work that is the cost of mediocrity.
The entire game is VERY much like blogging, which is one reason I've been able to successfully jump over to blogging :). I like blogging far better because I entered the game early enough that I didn't actually have to play by the rules to do well (and also because I understood the by-the-rules game well enough to know HOW to break it successfully... unlike in academia, in blogging you don't have to be a true genius like Perelman to break out of the game...)