Writing for Publication

Many search and discovery tools rely on the title, abstract and keywords to retrieve relevant information.  That means you have 3 opportunities to maximise the chances of your work being retrieved in a relevance-based search. 

Best practice suggests that titles should be succinct, so it isn’t always possible to fully reflect the main topics of an article in the title.  The abstract allows for a fuller description and will capture the significant topics.  Keywords provide an opportunity to supplement the description of the work and increase the chances of it being retrieved.

When developing keywords, you should consider the words and phrases your target audience could use to search for information on your topic that are not included the title or abstract.

• Use
  • synonyms, abbreviations, acronyms and short form versions of the main topics. For example, take a phrase from your abstract or title and look for a synonym or a related term. Your title might contain the phrase “teenage drivers”, you could add “young drivers” or related terms like “boy racer” or “girl racer” as keywords 
  • phrases of 2-4 words because you can be more descriptive. For example, “mental health” or “heart disease” 
  • a minimum of 3 keywords or use phrases (where possible) 

• Don’t add in “just in case” words or phrases that includes words or ideas that are mentioned in your work but are not central to the topic of the paper.

• Test your keywords.  Run a search using your keywords to see if you can retrieve information that is similar to your paper

If you need help generating keywords, try to; 

• identify synonyms using thesaurus.com 
• look at the keywords of papers that are similar to your own (from your bibliography)
• use a keyword generator.  Keyword generators create a word cloud based on your abstract.  However, please check that the keywords are descriptive enough, appropriate and comply with the criteria outlined above (not already included in the title or abstract). Word cloud generators are available at TagCrowd and Jason Davies. 

You could also use ChatGPT  However, there may be privacy issues around uploading your work into an LLM. Make sure you fully understand the providers policy about sharing and using your data for training purposes.  For more information Artificial Intelligence, please see the AI Literacy guide.