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How Do I Get My Paper to Stand Out and Be Noticed?

T is a question that many of us ask ourselves frequently. In this metrics-driven world “noticed” seems to translate to the number of citations, but it means much more than that, and starts much earlier than publication. The first time you need your paper to “stand out” is when it hits the desk of the editor who must make the decision to send the paper for review or not. As the editors, we then want the potential reviewer to think this might be interesting to read, so they review it. After all, many researchers get several requests a week to review papers. Once published, the question in the title of this editorial really becomes vital. With the incredible volumes of science being published these days, having your paper “stand out and be noticed” is far from trivial. How to have your paper reach its intended audience is in itself a field of research with all sorts of questions being answered. A research paper, in this field, that attracted a lot of attention a couple of years ago, was a study on the correlation between the length of the title of a paper and the number of citations it received. The key finding from this paper was that papers with shorter titles were more likely to receive more citations than papers with longer titles. So, you might ask how this is relevant to the question, “How do I get my paper to stand out and be noticed?” Obviously, a short title that says nothing sensible will probably not help your paper get noticed. A Google search for this question directs you to discussions on social media, writing lay summaries, and other means to publicize your work. We discussed this very issue at a recent gathering of the editorial team. As important as these strategies are, the statement that really resonated with us was “write a clear paper”. At ACS Sensors, we thought we would address, over a series of editorials, what we think that means, starting with titles and abstracts. We feel these are the parts of a paper that are crucial for it to attract attention, because they are the parts of the paper that we see first. The title and abstract will of course be pivotal to whether someone will think about reading further, or not. And further into the paper is where the magic is. In the Letchford paper on title length, they suggest three reasons why papers with shorter titles attract more citations. The one that really resonated with us, and which relates to writing a clear paper, is that shorter titles may be easier to understand. We think it might be more than that. What we see at ACS Sensors is that the longer titles are often titles about what was done (a more process-based title), and the shorter titles are what was learned. We think that titles that convey the new knowledge are much more interesting and understandable than titles that tell you what experiments were done. After all, most of us want to know what you learned, and are only interested in what you did so we can formulate our own views as to whether your conclusion is correct. Common advice for writing a good title includes asking yourself questions as to what the paper is about. Seems like good advice to me. We have similar views in relation to abstracts. In our Author Guidelines (http://pubs.acs.org/paragonplus/submission/ ascefj/ascefj_authguide.pdf) we ask you to have three things in your abstract. These are what the sensing issue is that you are addressing (the scientific question), the strategy taken to address this question, and what you learned. We even give you two examples of such an abstract. We see very few abstracts with this basic structure; ones that do have a structure like we propose are a joy to behold. Many abstracts introduce the fieldnever tell us the research questionand tell us what was done, but stop there, neglecting to tell the reader what the research findings were. The reason we advocate for a given abstract structure in the Author Guidelines is so that the reader knows what the science is about, and so that the paper is more likely to get noticed. We want your paper to stand out with the scientific readership and the broader community. After all, metrics are so important in modern science, and the metric of impact factor is something we worry about. The importance of the abstract was beautifully highlighted in an editorial in J. Phys. Chem. Lett. by Greg Scholes (DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b01704) that was focused on Spotlighting articles that have broad appeal. The editorial highlighted that the reason that more scientific breakthroughs do not get reported in the general media is that the people reading them cannot understand them. Again, we think it is more than that: we think even if the reader does understand the abstract and title, they often do not understand what the findings are, and why they are important. So, if you want your work noticedand we really want the work you publish in ACS Sensors to be noticedthen we suggest writing abstracts and titles that tell us about the question being answered, and what was discovered.