Writing your article abstract and choosing your article keywords may seem like nothing more than basic administrative work to complete your article “package”—not unlike completing any type of application form or filling out any type of questionnaire to further a specific process.
In fact, though, an abstract and keywords can strongly influence your article’s online worth to readers, and both must be carefully considered and constructed very early on in the article’s development. Readers should know whether or not they want to read your entire article just by reading the abstract and keywords. As well, keyword choices will either boost your article’s search-engine optimization (SEO) or make it more difficult for potential readers to find.
An effective abstract must do the following things:
– It must motivate.
Why do we care about the problem and the results?
– It must provide a problem statement.
What problem are you trying to solve?
– It must describe an approach.
How did you go about solving or making progress on the problem?
– It must describe the results.
What’s the answer?
– It must summarize the conclusions.
What are the implications of your answer?
For examples of how you can improve your ability to write effective abstracts, see James Hartley’s article in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, “Making the Journal Abstract More Concrete”
The best keywords are not just individual words, but 2- to 4-word plain-language phrases that precisely describe your work (words that researchers might type into a search engine).
Common mistakes in choosing article keywords include
– Using single-word terms
– Choosing terms that are too broad and not focused on your work
– Using terms that are too specialized, which nobody searches for
Many considerations must go into making an article fit for online use. Learn about these in Jöran Beel et al.’s article “Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co” in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing
— Sheree Pell, Editorial Coordinator
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