Get Your Work Noticed: How Authors Can Help Readers to Find Annals Papers Online
Lee Kenny · The Annals of Occupational Hygiene · 2011
Most readers find papers through a web search, database, or indexing service using ‘search terms’. This makes it important for authors to ensure that the publicly available data relating to their paper (i.e. the title, abstract, keywords) do in fact contain the search terms that those interested in the paper are likely to use. It is also an advantage if the paper is ranked highly in the search results because as we all know, the higher the ranking, the more likely it is that the search engine user will click through. Techniques for optimizing academic papers for search engines are discussed in detail by Beel et al. (2010), who have examined the most popular academic search engines and the algorithms they use to rank search results (Beel and Gipp, 2009). There are many factors that influence search rankings, but the ones that authors can readily control are where the search terms appear and how many instances there are. As a general rule, the ranking order is likely to be influenced by: Search term in the title; then search term in the abstract; then search term in the keywords. To maximize the visibility of a paper therefore, it is important for authors to think about how other readers might find their work and to make a list of the 10 most likely search terms (words and phrases) that they will use, so that they can first optimize this list and then consider how best to use the terms on it in the title, the abstract, and the keywords of their manuscript. To optimize the search terms list, it is worth experimenting with putting the chosen terms into academic search engines to see what other results come up. For example, with Google Scholar, if there are many pre-existing papers with very large numbers of citations, it is very unlikely that a new paper with the same top search term will have high visibility since Google Scholar gives a very high ranking weight to citations. It is also important to check that the search term correctly identifies papers on topics that are closely related to the topic of your paper. For illustration, the results from exploring potential search terms for a paper on the topic of occupational diesel exposure are summarized in Table 1. In this case, one can see that the terms ‘diesel’ and ‘diesel exposure’ are too general to be useful; ‘occupational diesel exposure’ is the most specific term but an optimized search term list would also include the variants ‘industrial diesel exposure’ and ‘diesel exposure at work’. Illustration of academic search engine results Papers by authors named ‘Diesel’ were excluded. Illustration of academic search engine results Papers by authors named ‘Diesel’ were excluded. So armed with a final list of 10 search terms listed in order of preference, authors can maximize the visibility of their paper by skilfully weaving these into the title, abstract, and keywords. However, it is critically important to ensure that the end result still reads well and will engage the interest of the reader, encouraging them to move beyond the abstract to read the full paper. We have recently modified our ‘instructions for authors’ and our email communications with authors to encourage them to consider how to optimize the visibility of their work when producing or revising manuscripts. Our suggested way to use a search terms list is: The ‘number one’ search term from the list should appear somewhere in the paper’s title. This will usually be a short phrase summarizing the main subject of the paper. The ‘top 5′ search terms (including ‘number one’) should each appear at least once in the abstract, with the ‘top 3′ appearing more than once, if it is possible to do this while still adopt-ing a naturalistic and engaging style of writing. The ‘bottom 5′ can then be added as keywords. It is important to include variants and synonyms for the ‘top 5′ here if they exist, e.g. alternative names for chemicals. We propose to change the online submission process so that it no longer gives keyword prompts but asks authors to enter their own keywords. Further tips on skilfully weaving search terms into the title, abstract, and keywords, with worked examples, are given in a useful online article published by Sage at http://www.uk.sagepub.com/authors/journal/readership.sp.