Kudos (growkudos.com) is not a social networking site, or yet another profile – it’s a toolkit. Kudos is a free service which exists to help you manage your profiles and social media posts more effectively to maximize visibility of your work.

Kudos allows you to claim and describe your work for a variety of audiences, from your colleagues, to potential multi-disciplinary collaborators, to the general public. It also allows each contributor to put a personal statement onto a paper, describing your part in the work and putting your own personal spin on it. For example this publication, chosen at random, has been annotated with a short summary, had an image added, and each of the contributors has added a short personal comment.

Then all you have to do is use the inbuilt tools to share to multiple sources at once. You can even generate trackable links in Kudos for items without DOIs, so that however you do share your work – via email, social media, posters, discussion groups, scholarly networks etc – you can track which of those is really helping you maximize readership.

The metrics generated by these links include the number of people you have reached, the number of views, a global breakdown (which countries is your work attracting attention in), the Altmetric score (how is your work being discussed online), citation counts for publications, and a granular breakdown of the different ways you have communicated and which of these have been most effective. A recent study has shown that explaining and sharing via Kudos takes on average 10 minutes and leads to over 20% more downloads.

Kudos pro

Kudos have recently launched a pro version of their free to use platform, which extends their service beyond publications into the rest of your research, called Kudos Pro. This new service allows you to create profile pages for your work – whether for a specific project, or a general overview of your body of work. These pages are quick and easy to set up using a template. For example, this project, chosen at random, includes links to the profiles of the contributors and institutions, some publications as well as images and an extensive background to the project.

You can link from these pages to relevant materials and outputs, from links to surveys, code, data, images, to links to pre-prints/publications in your institutional repository, publisher website, pre-print server or even Kudos itself – this helps you provide a single ‘entry point’ to which you can direct people looking for more info about your work – while also enabling you to post outputs on other appropriate sites as you normally would.

Kudos Pro also includes a planning tool which can guide you through creating a communication, engagement and impact plan, helping you to identify target audiences, impact goals, and different activities that will help you achieve those goals with your project. You can also gather evidence of engagement and impact within this tool and download the plan and results for reporting, or to submit as part of a grant application to demonstrate the rigour with which you will plan and manage impact of your project.

Free access to Kudos pro

Given that many of the usual ways researchers communicate their work are currently off limits due to the current situation (e.g. conferences, workshops, meetings with stakeholders etc) Kudos have opened up the pro platform so that researchers can use it for free – people can claim their free access by signing up at https://growkudos.com/hub/projects

Kudos are also maintaining a project of their own collating Covid-19 research that has been annotated.