I need your help

This newsletter went quiet for a stretch. I resumed it a few weeks ago. I did so partly because I have things to say about research visibility, and partly, to be honest, to support a tool I am building (Loud Camel) that helps researchers get their work read.

Since I resumed, a few people have unsubscribed and no new readers have come in. Fair enough, that’s information. But it also means I’m writing into a slowly shrinking room, and I’d like to fix that before it gets quieter.

So here’s the ask: if anything here has been useful to you,

you forward this issue (or any past one) to one or two people who’d actually want to read it?

Here’s who I think Direction Matters is for:

• Researchers — especially early-career ones — who feel their papers vanish into the void after publication.

• PhD students and postdocs trying to figure out the unwritten rules of scholarly visibility, citations, and collaboration.

• Independent or unaffiliated scholars who don’t have an institutional megaphone behind them.

• People in research-adjacent roles — librarians, research office staff, science communicators — who think seriously about how knowledge actually travels.

• Anyone curious about the sociology of science — the Mertons and Latours of the world, not just the metrics dashboards.

If someone in your circle fits that description, a forward, a DM, or a “you should read this” post. Any of it helps more than you’d think.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for sharing.

— Boris