Can I Find You?

 The title, abstract, and keywords make your article visible. The words you choose affect how easily others can find and read your work. Keep in mind how others find your work and how you find theirs are “two sides of the same coin.” If you haven’t already, take a look at my posts “References?” and “Find Your Target Journal” for more about that.

So, how can I find you and how can you find me?

 If your article appears in a journal many investigators in your field read, they may find it while reading the table of contents. Most of the time, they don’t browse; they search. They turn to PubMed, Google, Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, and other databases, searching through thousands of papers in seconds. Searches of publication databases run on metadata, which are the search terms you choose – the article title, author names and affiliations, the article type, year and language of publication, the abstract, the article keywords, and the full text if the copyright allows it. Whether your paper appears near the top of the retrieval list depends on the search terms, or metadata you used. Remember that only 44% of searchers go to the second page of their Google results.

If you want to be at the top of the list, make your title highly focused. Clearly state your topic and highlight what is unique about your study. Write your abstract as a “hook” or “30 second pitch” including the study rationale, background, or objective; key methods, key results, and conclusions – all in 250 words or less.

Journals often recommend using medical subject headings (MeSH) as keywords, which are categories used by the National Library of Medicine to group similar articles together in the PubMed database. Despite the recommendation, most authors choose their own keywords and let PubMed find the best category. No worries, there is a natural language processing–or AI– tool called “MeSH on Demand.” It analyzes a block of text like the abstract and highlights words for you to use to search for articles in the same MeSH as yours. There is a link to what MeSH on demand does and how to use it at https://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/mj17/mj17_mesh_on_demand_update.html.

There is another way to find “needles in haystacks.” Delegate your search to your AI helper. Just give it instructions as you would to Siri, Alexa, Hey Google, C3PO, or R2D2. Just remember, it is a good idea to tell it to look for peer reviewed articles and that you will have to carefully check what it comes back with. The result will differ from your own search term results and the results of MeSH on demand because the AI helper uses its own specific rules to group different words with similar meanings and usage into a single, larger category or under the same umbrella.

Are you really interested in looking for what other investigators in your area of interest are doing and writing? Check out “Open Alex.” It’s the biggest publication database, and here is the way some people are using it https://osl.hypotheses.org/15701#:~:text=OpenAlex%20collects%2C%20processes%2C%20and%20provides,and%20connections%20among%20scholarly%20publications.

Remember, it’s all about words, pictures, and numbers. Searching for similar words will retrieve publications with figures and tables that complete the story. Don’t forget that your publication is someone else’s reference. Make it easy for them to find you.