Writing strategies for improving the access of medical literature

Abstract

When conducting a literature review, medical authors typically search for relevant keywords in bibliographic databases or on search engines like Google. After selecting the most pertinent article based on the title’s relevance and the abstract’s content, they download or purchase the article and cite it in their manuscript. Three major elements influence whether an article will be cited in future manuscripts: the keywords, the title, and the abstract. This indicates that these elements are the “key dissemination tools” for research papers. If these three elements are not determined judiciously by authors, it may adversely affect the manuscript’s retrievability, readability, and citation index, which can negatively impact both the author and the journal. In this article, we share our informed perspective on writing strategies to enhance the searchability and citation of medical articles. These strategies are adopted from the principles of search engine optimization, but they do not aim to cheat or manipulate the search engine. Instead, they adopt a reader-centric content writing methodology that targets well-researched keywords to the readers who are searching for them. Reputable journals, such as Nature and the British Medical Journal, emphasize “online searchability” in their author guidelines. We hope that this article will encourage medical authors to approach manuscript drafting from the perspective of “looking inside-out.” In other words, they should not only draft manuscripts around what they want to convey to fellow researchers but also integrate what the readers want to discover. It is a call-to-action to better understand and engage search engine algorithms, so they yield information in a desired and self-learning manner because the “Cloud” is the new stakeholder.

Keywords: Medical Subject Headings; Key words; Search engine optimization; Access; Citation; Impact factor

Core Tip: Reputable journals like Nature and British Medical Journal lay emphasis on ‘online searchability’ of articles in their author guidelines. This article urges medical colleagues to ‘look inside-out’ when drafting manuscript – to not only draft manuscripts around what we want to tell fellow researchers, but rather draft it in such a way that it embeds well what they are looking for. We hope that following these best practices will make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your articles to present them higher on the web-based-search results. Employing these strategies are often about making small modifications to the manuscript.