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Maximising Readership
Getting Maximum Readership and Exposure for Your Article
To make sure that your article gets the maximum readership and exposure, we allow Google and other search engines to index its full-text, we actively encourage people to sign up for contents alerting, we enable free citation-linking and we offer free access periods. In preparing your article for publication, there are things you can do to help maximise its readership and give it the maximum impact in the communities you want it to reach. These fall under the heading of ‘discoverability’.
‘Discoverability’: Making Sure Your Article is Easy to Find
The vast majority of readers find articles online by searching rather than browsing. Most searching is done using clusters of keywords, or key phrases (e.g. ‘youth justice’, rather than simply ‘youth’). Including key phrases which people searching are likely to use should make your article more discoverable.
To ensure that your article comes up when search engine users look for it, you should:
- Try to make the title of the article as clear as possible in describing its content
- Ensure that the abstract spells out clearly what the article covers and mentions any terms that people searching for such an article might be likely to use
- Make sure that you include appropriate key phrases or key words.
There are no exact rules on the right numbers of keywords or phrases, but up to 5 key phrases or 6-8 key words is probably about right.
Important words or phrases should appear in the title and be repeated in the abstract and key words/phrases, but it is good to have a reasonable spread of terms as well as making sure the major ones are emphasized. If you are working in a discipline where there is a recognised standard vocabulary (or ‘taxonomy’), you should ensure that the term you use fit with that vocabulary. In the case of life science and medical topics, we recommend the use of the National Library of Medicine’s ‘MeSH’ terms, used for indexing articles on MEDLINE/PubMed, which provides a consistent way to retrieve information that might use different terminology for the same concepts. More information can be found at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html
Users are likely to make their decision to read your article based on the title and maybe the abstract – make sure these give a clear picture of its content.
A good test is to type some of the key words or phrases you are intending to use into a search engine such as Google, to see if what comes out at the top of the listing of results is what you expect.