Ruth Meinzen-Dick and Agnes Quisumbing are International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI) researchers closely working with PIM on various topics including property rights and gender. In this blog, they share their experience and ideas about best ways to publicize results of scientific research.
A colleague asked us recently about the “secret” behind IFPRI’s strategy to share its work on gender and land. She mentioned that her colleagues had seen, and also heard from others, that the work got a lot of visibility and were wondering what the publication strategy was.
We thought a bit about this—and realized that the answer lay beyond a “publication strategy”—it was a communications strategy that involved formal (discussion papers, journal articles, conference presentations) as well as informal approaches (social media, blogs, and, very importantly, personal networking), but one that was anchored in many, many years of research.
Our work on gender and property rights (including, but not limited to land) began with an e-conference on gender and property rights in 1995. These were the early days of electronic collaboration (hard copy papers were mailed out, all postings were done by email—there were no blogs or websites then), and the e-conference culminated in a special issue of World Development that was published in 1996.
Fast forward to 2015, twenty years later, when our work on gender and land myths in Africa was prepared for a workshop in 2012, released as a discussion paper in 2013, presented in conferences and featured in blogs in 2014, and published as a journal article in Agricultural Economics and cited in the Washington Post in 2015. Even before the work was out in print, it had already circulated in the virtual world—research communications has changed a lot!
The paper “Policy reform toward gender equality in Ethiopia: Little by little the egg begins to walk”, by Neha Kumar and Agnes Quisumbing, was first published as an IFPRI discussion paper in 2012 and later as an article in World Development in 2015. Both were published open access, which helped increase the paper’s accessibility, discoverability, and re-use (citation). The Altmetric score means that the paper ranks in the 91st percentile of the 96,824 articles tracked by Altmetric, with one of the highest scores of any article ever published in World Development (#26 of 659 articles).
This has prompted an online discussion among our team and with our great colleagues in IFPRI’s Communications and Knowledge Management division (special thanks to Tamar Abrams and Luz Marina Alvare). So here are some thoughts about how to communicate one’s research effectively.
Photo: Increasing Production via Land Certificates, by Anthony Piaskowy/USAID