Title, abstract and keywords: a practical guide to maximizing the visibility and impact of your papers

Ensuring that your latest research paper is discoverable and attractive to readers is a key consideration when finalising your manuscript. A recent study by Patrice Pottier et al., published in Proceedings B, surveyed articles and journals in ecology and evolutionary biology looking at both the journal policies, and also how authors have constructed their titles, abstracts and keywords. The authors used their findings to make recommendations both for authors and for journals in ways to increase search engine optimisation (SEO) and appeal to readers.

Whilst our editors are still reviewing this to decide whether to make changes on our own journals, we felt that this was a good time to put together our list of tips for authors, based on this article and our own experiences as journal managing editors. By adhering to these few relatively simple rules, you can ensure that your research gets noticed early, stands out from the crowd, and receives proper attention in relevant meta-science syntheses.

Titles

An engaging yet descriptive title is important. The title of a paper is going to be the first thing that a potential reader looks at, and they may skim past your article quickly if it doesn’t catch their attention.

• Keep it fairly short (<20 words)
• Think carefully about the balance between making it too specific and too broad. Readers should be able to quickly understand what your research is about, but don’t make it so specific that readers don’t feel there will be broader interest.
• Use common terminology.
• Consider using humour, but be careful not to alienate non-English speakers and don’t include cultural references or metaphors that may not be globally understood.

Abstract

The abstract is very important. Once a title has engaged a reader, the abstract is going to be how they decide whether to read the whole paper or not. It is also essential for search engine optimisation (SEO) – a carefully worded abstract is a key way to make sure that your paper appears high up on search results pages. In addition to this, the abstract is used by journal editors to invite reviewers, and so it’s important that the abstract accurately reflect the content of your paper. People are asked to review so many papers so making sure that a potential reviewer can quickly decide whether your paper is in their expertise or not is key.

• Structure your abstract logically. You might consider providing a structured abstract with headings (if your chosen journal allows this). Otherwise consider following the IMRAD framework (introduction, methods, results, and discussion), or a simpler version of:
  
  
  • Why did you do the study?
  • What did you do (and how)?
  • What did you find out?
  • What does it all mean?
• Key elements of your study should be included. These include the taxonomic group, species name, response variable(s), independent variable(s), study area and study type. By including these components, the abstract becomes more discoverable to researchers searching for a specific aspect of your research.
• Place the most important key terms near the beginning of the abstract, as not all search engines display the entire abstract.
• Think about non-specialist readers, so avoid very technical jargon and acronyms, and make sure that your results are communicated clearly, emphasizing key points and avoiding complex statistical details.
• Use key terms or phrases that are likely to appear in search queries, ensuring they are not separated by words or special characters that might hinder discovery. For example, instead of ‘offspring number and survival’, consider using ‘offspring number and offspring survival’ to align with typical search queries (e.g. ‘offspring survival’). For similar reasons, avoid key terms separated by (suspended) hyphens (e.g. use ‘precopulatory and postcopulatory traits’ instead of ‘pre- and post-copulatory traits’) or containing special characters and symbols, unless they represent the most common terminology.
• We recommend that you ask people to read your abstract who are not familiar with your study and ask for feedback prior to submission.
• If your chosen journal offers it, consider providing translations of your abstract in other languages, particularly if your work is relevant to a certain region.

Lay abstract/plain language summary

Some journals may ask you to also provide a plain language summary (this may have other names). This shouldn’t just be a slightly edited version of your main abstract; instead, this is aimed at the general public so should serve a different purpose. This is where you should explain your work in a way that puts it into context, ensuring that is understandable and of interest to a non-scientist. But be careful not to overstate the general interest of your work by making it too broad.

Keywords

You may also be asked to provide keywords for your article. Some search engines will use these separately to the abstract and they can have a big impact on the search ranking process. Whilst the most relevant terms should be in the title and abstract, the additional keywords section can be a place to include broader terms or synonyms for other key terms already included.

This figure, taken from the article by Patrice Pottier et al., shows an example of a good title, abstract and keywords with the key points highlighted.

Think about how you find research yourself – what search engines you use and what terms you use to search with. If you have access, tools such as Google Trends can help to identify key terms that are more frequently searched online.

This post is a light introduction to these concepts – for more detail and many more tips please do read the article that this is inspired by.

Image credits:

1) Magnifying glass on blackboard. Credit: Ilmari Tasanen.

2) Figure 2 from Pottier et al. 2024