Today I am thrilled to celebrate a small achievement which I discovered unexpectedly. I found out through happenstance that my PhD Thesis in Astronomy has been downloaded impactfully more times than others in the topic of astronomy from the University of Turku, charting in many of these kind of metrics at the top, and what it means is that My PhD Thesis is making a difference with its social impact đ
Wow, I did not expect that, as in other metrics, my career is not so strong, such as I had more than one year of unemployment after completing the PhD degree, and even during the PhD degree, which took me seven years to finish, I had funding gaps, so lots of stress there. I actually recently published a book about these conundrums, “Helsinki and me”, if you wish to check out some of my chagrins on these topics.
So, this achievement, however small, brought a lot of happiness, because we always think that nobody is interested in our dissertations, but I always hoped that mine would make at least a tiny difference in the world, and it seems that the metrics show that it does impact not only my own career and is not opened only by my supervisor who is obliged to read it. What an amazing feeling! And Glory is to God because I never had any social media skills or a huge following, so all these initiatives which I undertook on social media and beyond where ideas that God blessed me with, out-of-the-box, creative, innovative, and engaging, such as YouTube platform videos and blog articles and more!
So what happened? I was attending as a postdoctoral fellow at IAPS/INAF a seminar which I found out through the rich seminar ecosystem of my institute. It was not suggested to me by anybody, I just pursued my own interests.
As one of my reverent pre-examiners pointed out in their review, my published articles had few citations. Even though I published my papers relatively recently, I already was impacted by how people view your citation metrics, so I was hoping to find out pearls of wisdom of what to do about getting cited. In particular, as a woman in astronomy and as an early career researcher, I was warned by the lore that women are cited less than men, and that early career researchers are also less cited, et cetera. I honestly don’t think that the number of citations is such a great marker of science quality of your research, as the impact of knowledge and paper can come years later, but nevertheless, it was an area to perhaps look into and see if something I can do to communicate my results better to the community or something else tangible, setting aside things I could not control. And by the way, huge kudos to the many people who highlight the work done by their young researchers on their teams, that’s a marker of a fair leader in research. I believed that my situation was not a case where my work was not good enough and I thought that the science was also very interesting, as I used observations, but it is true my papers are just drop of knowledge, so how to get others interested in that drop is not so straightforward to me.
Here are the info points about the seminar:
How to promote your research? seminar by Andrea Gonçalves, a Senior Account Development Manager, a seminar organized by Springer Nature.
Description: Unlock the full potential of your research with our upcoming webinar “How to promote your research”! Once your article is published in open access, promoting it effectively is crucial to reaching your audience and making a significant impact. In this engaging session, you’ll discover innovative strategies to amplify your research’s visibility and leverage social media and academic networks to connect with peers and the broader community. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how to maximize the impact of your research and make a lasting impression in your field.
At one point, she was discussing “altmetrics”, a concept completely new to me. Apparently it is another type of metric for impact of your research outside of citations and h-index, which is sometimes so random and not dependent on you, such as if you are fortunate to have good connections or an advisor who has active know-how and willingness to promote your research, an active collaboration with others, etc.
Altmetrics is “alternative metrics”, and the LibGuides website explains is as “Altmetrics let us measure and monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions.”
As the speaker was discussing it I had an idea to check if I can see how many people visited my PhD Thesis website. I poured a lot of work into writing my thesis, including a good introduction, and I also tried to share with the general public and with astronomy community my work, to welcome people who are interested in it to pursue their research despite any challenges they might face – internal or external. For example, I did a series of explanations on YouTube about the figures in my thesis, and I am not a super videographer or anything like that. I am just passionate about connecting with people and sharing my passion for science. I also used my thesis topic of quasars to lead engaging workshops in person in Armenia for kids and adults.
While I did not find that metric, I found that UTU reports another metric, the number of downloads of the thesis. A quick comparison with the archival data from the University of Turku doctoral dissertations available online and which have the keyword “astronomy” in them, I found out that my dissertation stands out in the number of downloads.
Using Google Sheets I composed the following statistical points about the impact:
As of November 2025 today
- My thesis has the highest number of downloads in the past 7 years (since 2018!).
- The difference is almost 50 % higher than average trend in those years!
- In the past more than a decade, 13 years to be exact, it is the 3rd most downloaded thesis at the University of Turku, with keywords “astronomy” available on the online archive.
- The thesis with the most citations from all 13 years has been published actually 13 years ago, so it had a longer time than mine to collect downloads, as mine was published only a year ago.
That means from my University dissertations, its impact is unprecedented in the social media metrics, or altmetrics in general.Â
I am so happy! Here is my victory dance –Â https://youtube.com/shorts/l1eebYK9GLo?feature=share
Please celebrate with me and if you have any ideas of how I can contribute more to the general public to make astronomy and sciences in general more accessible, welcoming, interactive , engaging, and friendly, let me know! I am happy to chat or give talks and lead workshops.
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