Last updated on Sunday, October 11th, 2020

In an earlier post, I had discussed the importance of the online word in reference to the research article search in different search engines. In this article, you will read the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of a research article and how to optimize it for various search engines.

How to Use SEO for Research Papers

Yes! to date research scholars have to use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for their research work. SEO word is more familiar for website ranking among the bloggers and professional website builders. As you know this is an age of information and everyone tries to search for an answer to any problem or curiosity from search engines whether that is of Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL and DuckDuckgo, etc.

When you search for any information from Google Search Engine, you just type a single word or some keyword phrase. The Google algorithm designed in a way, searchable word(s) related information displays on the panel/screen in order. This order contains a sequence of different website pages. How this order arranges with such relevant information only google algorithm knows. While the rest of us just imagine the way, yes still there are some specific steps. If followed by one in an article then most probably that page comes at high rank in search i.e. on first pages of search engines.

The similarity between a web blog and research article of a journal

apniPhysics is a website, where I write some technical blog with information related to Physics subject and academics. I want my web pages to come on at the top ranking of search engines. So for this purpose, I use SEO tools and will try to optimize the site for google ranking. That includes a title of the post with a limited alphabet number, mention as up to 60 letters.  The meta description is limited from 230 to 320 letters. Also, an image that is used in the post or anywhere on the page of the site it should have a proper description and attributes. In the text, it is a must to put h1, h2, and other headings.

Some bold and Italic words along with internal links which are a research paper can be defined through DOI links. The external links of relevant information on different web pages are equivalent to other authors’ research papers reference in DOI form.

A blog post is directly associated with the website for a specific category and keywords. In the same way, a research article published by the author listed on the journal website for a specific area of the subject along with keywords.

The professional bloggers always try to reach up to an individual who is part of the target audience. The reasons may be different but one thing in common they want the reader must remain in touch with his contents. In some cases, the strategy remains to convert a reader into a customer. But in the case of a research article when an author publishes the research paper(s) he never thinks and uses strategy about the post-publication results.

Post Publication Results or SEO is in Publisher’s hand

Why all researchers leave the post-publication results in the publisher’s hand? I think the reason for it is that most authors are not aware of the working of a research publication. But some may be little awareness of the word of indexing, which one related to the journal and a publication agency. Actually, these indexing agencies remain specifically involved in the circulation of the data in terms of on and off lines to the various search engines/libraries/depositories.

You can understand this idea in this form also. They develop the program in such a way, research articles made available and searchable on search engines and state libraries easily to the concerned readers. They use depositories for this purpose and remain connected with different sources.

Here, a publisher is responsible for research articles, those may provide credit in terms of paper citations. It means research papers remain more approachable to the readers with positive and healthy approaches. If published documents or an article are not cited externally, without any suggestions or personal approaches by the publisher to the other author(s), after 2-4 yrs of publications, what conclusion one should extract about the article. Many times such publications are involved with heavy public funds in terms of collaboration via government agencies.

An article with a high impact factor but none external citation may raise the questions about its credentials. Also significant contribution in terms of research and social-scientific developments.

In such cases, one has to be very alert, when one referee suggests/recommended to include some references in the unpublished research papers. This practice actually has two faces, sometimes requirements and sometimes wrong approaches. I personally feel who writes and submit the research papers in a reputed journal in terms of impact factor obviously author already try to include the latest developments in his area in terms of the references.

Instead of giving the set of references one can suggest including the latest references for the specific area. In recent years. It has been observed that citation per document decreases effectively in various journals. There are many things which we have to improve in quality research and publications which indicates.

SEO Conclusion:

If the author is not bound by the publisher in terms of transferring the rights of research papers via the copyright transfer form. One author has to share his research paper through his blog/website/research community/social media partially or in the full form. So parallel to the indexing of the journal at own level one can get the credit in terms of citations. If possible one has to take local SEO services.

Disclaimer:

These thoughts are independent thought of the author (Dr. Sushil Kumar) not directly or indirectly focused on one or many and relate to someone approaches/exercise. If it happens it can be by chance and the author is not responsible for that. The purpose is only just to make aware of a scholar through post/article about the latest tech and info.