HomeBlogPublishing SoTL Telling Your Research Story: Maximizing Your SoTL Impact by E. Cline June 13, 2025 Share: Section NavigationSkip section navigationIn this sectionBlog Home AI and Engaged Learning Assessment of Learning Capstone Experiences CEL News CEL Retrospectives CEL Reviews Collaborative Projects and Assignments Community-Based Learning Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity ePortfolio Feedback First-Year Experiences Global Learning Health Sciences High Impact Practices Immersive Learning Internships Learning Communities Mentoring Relationships Online Education Place-Based Learning Professional and Continuing Education Publishing SoTL Reflection and Metacognition Relationships Residential Learning Communities Service-Learning Signature Work Student Leadership Student-Faculty Partnership Studying EL Supporting Neurodivergent and Physically Disabled Students Undergraduate Research Work-Integrated Learning Writing Transfer in and beyond the University Style Guide for Posts to the Center for Engaged Learning Blog This is the last installment in a series on impact measurement for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) researchers. The first part covered traditional metrics, while the second showcased newer, more unconventional ways to track impact. As noted in the introduction to this series, the research impact ecosystem has been built around structures that exist in the sciences. These structures can be leveraged in different ways to help promote work in other fields, like SoTL. Unlike parts one and two, this section is short, because maximizing research impact really boils down to just two things: Get your work out there. Make sure people know it’s you. Get your work out there Many are the researchers who finish a project… just leave it at that. No judgment from this author, who can see at least one poster gathering dust in the corner of my office. Whether the end product was a panel discussion (is the recording sitting in some neglected folder on your computer?) or a published work (maybe buried somewhere on a publisher’s site?), there are actions you can take to increase the visibility of your hard work. Why bother? Put simply: increased visibility means increased opportunities for others to find, engage with, and build on your work. A few possibilities include: Deposit items (of any type or format) in institutional repositories (after they’ve officially been published, if you’re pursuing publication with traditional academic journals or presses). Promote your work on the social web. For scholarly works, (1) opt for open access (where feasible—sometimes your institution can help with APCs) or (2) post preprints (if allowed—check Jisc’s open policy finder for permissions by publication). Explore Your Work How has your work been disseminated in the past? Pick one of your works that you wish more people engaged with. Could any of the possibilities (listed above) help you promote that work? Make sure people know it’s you There are a lot of works—traditional and not—in SoTL. Focusing on the individuals behind those works can quickly become confusing. Publications, cultures, and people prefer vastly different naming conventions, so it’s not always evident that, to borrow a common example, Thomson W. and Kelvin refer to the same person—William Thomson, later known as Lord Kelvin, the nineteenth-century physicist famous for his work on thermodynamics and the transatlantic telegraph. Individuals also change their names to reflect milestones in their personal lives. Plus, a reduction to a simple initial and a surname for publication means that many researchers appear alongside unrelated scholars in a search. To illustrate all these issues, I have deliberately used a byline for this series that’s typical for publication but not exactly distinguishing. Who could the “E. Cline” writing this series be? Since the topic is research and SoTL, we can easily exclude people outside academia. A quick Google Scholar search shows there is an E. Cline in physics, but a different E. Cline works and publishes in history. Neither is me! If you guessed my current institution (Elon University) and/or happen to know my first name (which is Ellen), you might still do a search and come up with results from the seemingly similar scholar EL Cline who is still not me, but that is actually my cousin. Last, if you recognized my qualifications in my bio (MSLS, a common degree for a librarian), that should finally point you to results for the correct person: EF Cline. Without the context, name ambiguity becomes a real problem. Any technology is going to have a tough time sorting this out, which means that impact that might actually be due to your hard work may not be correctly attributed. Fortunately, three things can help: Claim your Google Scholar profile (for free!). This will clear up any discrepancies in that search engine. Consider creating an ORCiD (also free) and/or another researcher ID. This persistent identifier links your scholarship across platforms, saves time on submissions, and—as a bonus—is a great way to talk about your contributions to particular works. Keep both profiles up to date as your SoTL work evolves. Explore Your Work How are you currently managing your online identity as a SoTL scholar? If someone searched for your SoTL works today, would they be able to find the correct version of you? Final Thoughts The ways to tell the story of your research and its impact are varied and numerous. Which method is “best”? I encourage you to pick the one that feels most comfortable and makes you look great. And, if you can: reach out to your local librarians. If you’re on a college campus, many academic libraries have staff who can assist in navigating these conversations. For example, Elon University’s Measuring Your Research Impact guide contains all these tips—and more. About the Author Ellen Cline is the Engineering & Physical Science Librarian at Elon University. She holds an MSLS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and previously served as a Research Librarian at Missouri University of Science & Technology. How to Cite This Post Cline, E. 2025. “Telling Your Research Story: Maximizing Your SoTL Impact.” Center for Engaged Learning (blog). June 13, 2025. https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/telling-your-research-story-maximizing-your-sotl-impact.
