Keywords are life!

Scientific keywords may be messy, but to save us there are MeSH... 😜

Make your paper frontpage news! 

The scientific paper is the most publicly scrutinised and main academic outcome of a study. It takes a while to get right, a long time to draft, and years to gather data. 

After all that, it's sometimes difficult to answer:

  • What did you set out to discover?
  • How did you do it?
  • What did you actually find?

If there is are a couple of scientific terms that keep popping up in the answers to these questions, then they are your keywords. These are commonly used, yet specific terms.


Now, we should assess how relevant these are to your own work.

MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is a thesaurus used for indexing, cataloging, and searching of biomedical and health-related information. It is continually updated, controlled, and hierarchical.

MeSH on Demand allows you to upload a text and have it automatically processed so that MeSH terms will be highlighted and linked terms that are broader in scope will be suggested.

Repeat your keywords in the title, abstract, and throughout your article. Be consistent with your field. Link to your article across your social media. And repeat. Repeat a lot.

And why is this important, you may ask?

Because more than half of all traffic to major publishers' online library comes directly from search engines. And search engine algorithms favour content identified as being of linguistic high quality, original, and relevant to the user’s search.

So, if you want to be cited by people everywhere... get your paper to appear on the first landing page. 

Make your paper frontpage news!  

Discover Storytelling for Science!

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