Hi.
This is Karen McKee, retired scientist and author.
Did you know that around two and a half million scientific papers are published each year?
Do you know how many of those papers are actually read?
At one time, it was claimed that about half of academic papers were read only by the author
and the journal editors and reviewers.
Fortunately, that statistic turns out to be an exaggeration.
Unfortunately, with the deluge of papers growing annually, it's increasingly difficult for
authors to reach their potential audience.
So, in this video, I'm going to focus on how you can optimize your scientific article for
discovery by your colleagues.
The online visibility of a document, such as a scientific paper, can be improved by
applying something called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
What this means is that you make sure that your paper's title, keywords, and abstract
contain important search terms that people will use to locate articles about your topic.
I'm going to walk you through the SEO process using one of my papers published in 2014.
Let's first look at the title of the paper.
You want to craft a title that contains key search terms that people will use to search
for articles on your topic.
Search engines look for search terms in the title of a document.
At the same time, you want a title that sounds interesting and clearly states what the paper
is about.
Here is the original title of our paper.
"The relative role of mangrove vegetation in maintenance of soil elevations within the
intertidal habitat"
Not only is this title long and sounds like a pretty boring paper, but it is missing an
important keyword relevant to the topic of our paper, and that is, sea level.
Here is the final title of our paper.
How mangrove forests adjust to rising sea level.
The new title is more compelling, easier to understand, and contains three important search
terms, which are highlighted.
Colleagues interested in articles about mangroves, forests, or sea level will be more likely
to find the paper.
Let's now look at the keyword field and the abstract.
You want to select keywords and phrases that relate to your study but also common search
terms that people may use to find information.
And don't just list terms used in your research.
Think about broader terms related to your topic such as disturbance, nutrients, salinity,
tropical, and elevated carbon dioxide and include them in the keyword field.
Then you want to repeat the words in your title and keyword field contextually throughout
the abstract.
This is because search engines look for search terms repeated throughout the document to
assign its ranking.
Here, you can see all the words in the abstract that repeat the terms in the title and keyword
field.
For example, the term, mangrove, the subject of our research, is repeated seven times.
The more repetition, the better the ranking in a search.
We also used some general terms in the abstract such as wetland, resilience, organic matter,
vegetation, plants, and ecosystem.
Those are common search terms that a reader might also use to search for information.
SEO can really help you reach readers, who may later cite your paper, invite you to collaborate
on their next research project, or offer you a job.
So, I encourage you to give it a try.
SEO takes only a bit more time and effort to improve your paper's discoverability.