Years ago, scholars and scientists kept their research secret. New scientific discoveries had to be guarded jealously, using coded language and ciphers, for fear a competitor could steal the data and claim it as their own. Nowadays this is no longer the case, and the best thing to do with a new, early-stage research paper is to share it as broadly as possible. The more papers you add to SSRN, the more your reputation as a scholar grows, and the more likely your research is to be cited in others’ work. Any scholarly research you’ve produced is eligible for inclusion in SSRN’s eLibrary, even work you produced when you were a student and published work (provided with written permission from the journal publisher).

SSRN can help you get your early-stage research noticed, cited, and shown to people across the world. Once your working paper is uploaded to the SSRN community, it is available to be viewed and downloaded, and you can share links to it. SSRN collects paper downloads, references, and citations as part of the metrics on your author page. In addition, we’ve added the PlumX widget to showcase your social channel mentions. Mendeley data datasets allow you to organize, share, and manage several types of files attached right to your SSRN author profile. And once our processors and classifiers have finished reviewing it, it may be distributed in one or more of our eJournals as an interdisciplinary article of interest.

Just last week, the research papers submitted to SSRN were disseminated to over 100,000 individuals in 1,000 eJournals across 30 research networks!

SSRN’s eJournals have thousands of subscribers worldwide, including individual subscribers as well as institutions. The eJournals distribute papers to other researchers, who might then cite your paper in their own research. Most papers are eligible to be distributed in more than one eJournal, so that’s more eyes on your research. And if we don’t have the perfect eJournal for your paper yet, we will soon. New eJournals are arriving all the time – our two newest deal with Earth Science and Space & Planetary Science!

Once your work is uploaded to SSRN and distributed in eJournals, that’s not the end of your relationship with SSRN! If a peer-reviewed journal accepts your work for publication, you can go back and add a reference to the published version on SSRN. If you revise or edit the work at any later date, you can upload multiple versions of a paper to keep your research current. SSRN has tools to help you grow at every stage of your journey from student to research scholar.

Start sharing your ideas on SSRN today!

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