Editorial Workflow Considerations

Articles, Research Reviews, the News Feed, Scholar Profiles, and Events are the heart of your Research AMP site. Before you begin building a Research AMP site, it helps to create some guidelines for how this content will be created and maintained. Here are some ideas you may want to keep in mind as you build out your content management infrastructure.

Articles and Research Reviews

  • Editorial workflow: How will ideas for written content be generated? Will they be written by Research AMP team members, or will you ask other authors to contribute? Who will edit the reviews? Who will copy edit them, and who will post them on the site?

  • Article Format: How long should each type of content be? Who is the intended audience? Will they include an abstract?

  • Timeline: How often will research reviews and articles be published to your site? In addition, it is worth bearing in mind that there can be lag time in creating written content; it can take several months to write a research review, for example, and longer if you choose to have it peer reviewed.

  • Peer Review: Do you want the review read by other scholars before it is published? Peer review can take at minimum 6 weeks, and usually longer, so you should factor that in to your publication schedule.

  • Citation style: What citation style will you use for all of the content on your site? Choose one, perhaps the one that is most common in your discipline, and use it for all the content on your site. You should also draw up guidelines for how you will hyperlink to external content.

  • DOI: There is space on the Research AMP site to enter a "digital object identifier"—a persistent identifier for your content—which can be used to track how your research review is cited in academic publications and spread on social media. DOIs are optional; if you wish to capture this data, you will need to procure one through a DOI registration agency (https://www.doi.org/the-community/existing-registration-agencies/).

  • Images: All written content needs a hero image; we suggest using a stock image website like Unsplash to find free, open-source images to correspond with your content. Make a regular practice of writing alt text for any images, so your site is accessible to site readers.

News and Events

You should develop guidelines for what types of content you will post on the news and events feeds, how often this will happen, and which team member is responsible for updating news and events.

At the outset, it is useful to develop a list of the key news outlets, listservs, podcasts, nonprofits or research institutes, academic centers, academic organizations, or any other publication or group that bears on your topic. You can then use the list to source new content for your news and events feeds. You may want to create an RSS feed to keep track of new articles or events from these groups that team members can monitor for new and relevant content.

Your collaborators can prove very useful in helping surface relevant items to share with the broader community. Consider approaches to include key collaborators in this workflow so that you have a broad conception of the field and community you are serving.

You will also need to develop a schedule for how often the content will be updated. Choose one that matches the pace of news, reports, and events for your topic, but also allows for a manageable workload for your team.

Scholar Profiles

A simple method for collecting information from scholars to build your scholar profiles section is to use an online form, such as Google Forms. You can set up the form to ingest a scholar's name, title, affiliation, short biography, contact information, ORCID, social media handles, and links to their most relevant citations.

We recommend that you require scholars to contribute a headshot for their profile picture.

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