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The way in which scientific publications appear online is going to become increasingly important. How literacy research is conducted is changing rapidly. People are turning to online resources rather than utilizing libraries. Publications that haven’t been made available on the internet may be overlooked. This could result in your paper not being referenced as often, or worse, your research may be repeated.

The number of citations a paper receives helps to determine the impact of the research within that paper. Even if your research is excellent, if no one finds the paper it won’t be cited.

The probability of your paper being read increases the closer it is to the number one search result.

So how do you become the #1 publication in search results?

SEO (search engine optimization) is a field that studies how search engines are influenced by content. The basis for this work is that it is believed that search engines are not perfectly efficient. Therefore with a little tweaking, you may be able to give your publication the boost it needs to be noticed and deemed an appropriate match by search engines. Just to be clear, papers should not be poorly written in an attempt to gain search ranking and in the end content will have a much great impact than SEO.

There are many factors a search engine considers when assembling a results page. The scientist in me cringes a bit at presenting this information since the search algorithms are kept secret making it very difficult to know exactly how search results can be influenced.

Today, we are going to focus on the two items that you can control.
1) Paper Title
2) Keyword Density

Paper Title:
The basics of SEO of titles is that your keywords (the search terms that you people may use to find your paper) should be contained within your title. Although opinions are mixed it is also thought that keywords placed near the beginning have a higher influence than those at the end.

Here’s a great example of how a title should be written for SEO from Acta D:
‘Eukaryotic expression: developments for structural proteomics’

An example of a disadvantageous title would be:
‘The 1.6 Å resolution crystal structure of a mutant plastocyanin bearing a 21-25 engineered disulfide bridge’

The problem here is the resolution of the structure is listed first in the title. More than likely, this paper is going to rank higher for the term ‘1.6 Å’ rather than, for example, ‘mutant plastocyanin’.
If you were the author of this paper and thought each word in that title was critical, it would be more beneficial to arrange the words as follows:

‘Mutant plastocyanin a 1.6 Angstrom crystal structure bearing a 21-25 engineered disulfide bridge’

This tweaked title would be ideal if you were looking to rank for ‘mutant plastocyanin’.

Keywords:
Of course, your paper should be written for humans, but it may help to keep search engines in mind. Although not as influential as in the past increasing the keyword percentage in your document should also help. For example, if you wanted to keyword for ‘protein crystallization’ think about if you can increase the number of times the term is being used.

Again, I don’t have direct proof of how much influence these changes make, but many top brands have excellent top keyword density (percent that term is used on their site) and my feeling is that it wasn’t by accident:
Zappos: shoe (8.33%), shoes (7.78%), zappos (5.00%)
Visa: visa (25.00%), card (10.61%), cards (4.55%), credit (3.03%)
JCrew: crew (6.77%), clothing (3.59%), dresses (3.19%)

Take some time and really think about the title of your paper and what keywords are important. You may find that the one thing standing between you and the first page of Google scholar……is a little tweaking.