Are You Visible?
Your title, abstract, and keywords make your article visible. The words you choose are a strong influence on how easy it will be for others find and read your work.
f your article appears in a journal many of the investigators in your field actually read, they may stumble on it while skimming the table of contents. But most of the time, they won’t “browse”; they’ll search. They’ll turn to PubMed, Google, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and similar databases—letting algorithms sift through thousands of papers in seconds. The search algorithms run on metadata, which are fields in the database, the article title, author names and affiliations, the abstract, and the full text if the copyright allows that, article type, year and language of publication, and the keywords are scanned. These database fields are indexed, and the words in each record–the metadata–the title, abstract, and the full text of the article when copyright allows, and scanned.
When a researcher enters a query, hundreds of journals are searched at once. Whether your paper appears near the top depends largely on your title and abstract. Make your title highly focused: clearly state your topic and highlight what is unique about your study. Write your abstract for both search engines and humans. Intentionally repeat three or four precise, descriptive phrases from your manuscript—the same phrases you would use to search for your own paper—to maximize discoverability and impact.
Keywords are meant to help people find your article after indexing, and journals often advise including some that do not appear in the title or abstract. A librarian and knowledge management specialist recommends using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) from the National Library of Medicine database (https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html). On the MeSH site, use "MeSH on Demand" and its tutorial. If you draw your keywords from MeSH, database searches are more likely to retrieve your article alongside closely related publications.
Searching relies on words, but the articles you locate also contain figures and tables. In essence, it’s about words, images, and numbers. Keep in mind that the way other researchers discover your work and the way you discover theirs—and what all of you are trying to find—are “two sides of the same coin.”
Be aware that even if you are good at searching for references that you need for a systematic review or meta-analysis, or to use in an article about your original research, your favorite AI assistant and helper will find things much faster than you can, because it can