There’s nothing more tragic than time and effort spent on a project going to waste.
Today’s academia and publishing industry is defined by the routine publication of scholarly, peer-reviewed papers in applicable journals. From the digital arts and humanities to biological and nuclear sciences, scholarly journals range in style, publication rate and reach, format, subject matter, and various other considerations like publication frequency and format (paper, digital, etc.). Books, be they digital, paper, a mix of both, and self-published or mainstream published, have the same wide variance.
For those working in academia, publishing research papers is key to not only ensuring career advancement and reputation, but also often the direct, literal livelihood. Many colleges employing professors or doctoral candidates require a set amount of publications in a given period, i.e. at least one research paper a year. This is to maintain academic integrity, define and influence professional and collegiate reputation, as well as ensure a produced body of work with which the school can lure students. Professors with more clout can make a good marketing advantage for competing schools.
Many years ago, trade journals, just like everyone else, went online. Scholarship became a digital project, and the costs to entry became cheaper and cheaper. Some trades only publish online. With this massive influx of availability, the market for research papers is existentially crowded. Google Scholar, the most widely-used of the digital academic repositories, is filled to bursting with papers on every topic imaginable. They link to articles from across the academic publishing spectrum, ranging from entirely free (open access) to paywalled. To see certain articles, you have to have subscriptions to the relevant journals.
Google Scholar aims to work the way researchers do: ranking documents based on factors like keywords, when it was published, who published it, and, perhaps most importantly, how recently it was cited and by whom/how many. It also returns book titles, if found to be relevant to queries. You can sort by certain years, or by relevance. You can include citations and patents, if desired. Google Scholar has limitations of course, especially in its search parameters. You can’t sort or search by disciplinary field, and search results are limited. Many of the documents returned cannot be fully accessed without a subscription to the publication. Some journals don’t let their materials be indexed there.
For academics looking to get their published work more seen, the challenge is optimizing papers the way one optimizes blogs or webpages. This is called academic SEO. Papers that show up more often lead to a wider readership, which can lead to more academic clout and better standing in the field. This can lead to more research opportunities, particularly collaborations with other eminent researchers that can yield career advancements. Reputations and careers have been built entirely on the strength of a published academic oeuvre.
From a bibliometric point of view, the h-index remains an important signifier of valued published work. The h-index is a metric that measures the productivity and citation impact of publications. It used to only be used for an individual researcher or scholar but has since branched out into wider application. Much like PageRank evaluates the weighted quality of inbound links to a website, so does the h-index value the citations to a given paper. This score is one of the initial formulations of what we now call SEO, which derives from information retrieval in libraries and publications.
For a scholar working in the peer-reviewed publication process, it is thus obviously very important to not only have great citations in their papers themselves, but to produce work that will be highly linked to in other journals. When designing research proposals, it isn’t a bad idea to consider heavily the sources one will cite, as well as the potential sources one would like to be cited by. Consider uses for the research, and its broader applications to the field that would make it a commonly cited asset.
Like with webpages, title optimization is a huge factor in academic SEO. Too short and they aren’t distinguishable enough; too long, and they not only won’t catch attention but also will likely be cut off on mobile browsers or in Google Scholar’s SERP snippet. It’s also valuable to similarly optimize the abstract, using relevant, helpful keywords that concisely give a more complete picture in the returned snippet. Much like the inverse pyramid of writing, lead with the salient facts (who, what, when, where, why) and let the keywords reinforce the writing and thesis from then on.
In addition to Google Scholar (Microsoft Academic, ResearchGate, etc.), important ranking signals for academic search optimization
include:
· Title
· Author names
· Abstract
· Headings and subheadings
· Keywords
· Text in the body
· Tables and/or figures
· Publication or journal name
· User keywords
· Social annotations and citations
· Descriptions
· File names
· Uniform resource identifiers (URIs) or digital object identifiers (DOIs)
Many of these listed factors fall under the metadata portion of the strategy. If submitting PDF files, it’s important to use identifying information like author and title. Many uploading mechanisms across these sites allow you to input field information, aka metadata, describing in detail what the paper is about. This is where a concise list of keywords and descriptions comes into play. The archivable PDF/A standard should be used for long-term readability that is also accessible across systems.
It’s also important to note that, at least as of this writing, only certain picture file types are indexable and searchable. Text in figures and tables will be indexed only if they are within a vector graphic. Raster graphics, such as common PNGs and JPEGs, will not have their text indexed. Common programs (Illustrator, Corel, PowerPoint) can generate vector graphics that are machine-readable. Search engines can likely read captions if properly formatted, so optimizing those is also good diligence. Useful charts can also potentially help in relevance ranking.
Digital object identifiers (DOIs) ensure a publication can be permanently accessed and found via stable links, even if its URI has changed. With the internet and its links essentially rotting and falling away over time, a persistent backup for material helps maximize visibility as well as preserve it for the future. It also helps clear up potential disputes and ambiguities in metadata such as name similarities, changes, variations, spellings, and foreign characters. Beware of certain symbols in titles—they might not show up at all, or affect the ranking of papers negatively. It’s usually a good call to avoid them entirely if possible, at least in titles and the abstracts. Pay attention to diacritics in words, too, as well as hyphen usage.
All of these factors also apply to ranking on booksellers such as Amazon. Titles, names, and links or metadata are valuable sources of potential product verification and findability. For instance, when I published my own books, I made sure to purchase my own ISBNs (international standard book numbers) through Bowker, the official national seller. I’d assign a title to the ISBN, and insert important metadata characteristics to ensure the details, dates, covers, descriptions, and all identifying information were accurate. There are a lot of published books each year. It’s extremely easy to get them confused with one another. For a seller or writer, it’s vital to stand out with every weapon in the arsenal, and metadata is one of, if not the best method to do that from a backend data viewpoint.
I also was a registered publisher through the Library of Congress’s Preassigned Control Number (PCN) Program. I then printed the assigned Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) in the front of my book next to the copyright registration data and the ISBN. Upon publication, I sent a copy of my book to the Library of Congress for it to be catalogued. It was important to me to control all aspects of the digital signature around the books and to make sure they were findable, relevant, and interesting enough to help them be found. When I submitted them to be sold on the Ingram catalogue, including on Amazon, that data remained consistent across all platforms so there would be no book browser confusion about what product they were looking at or for. This is essential for Kindle, where the store is crowded with knockoffs, ripoffs, and lookalikes that can compete for attention.
Unfortunately, major publications exert heavy influence over the process of academic publication. Many times authors and researchers will not have control over their paper once it’s been submitted. Even the choice of peer-review is beyond their control, as is the format and venue of the paper. Hopefully this will begin to change in the future, and hopefully drives to open access (recently successful in Europe) will allow greater scholar control over their work and its distribution.
It’s important, when writing the body text and creating the project, to be as concise, clear, and accurate as possible. No amount of SEO or metadata can cover up for poor craftsmanship or shoddy writing. Reputational hits exist for work that is lazy or ill-thought out, especially in academia. Consider sample sizes carefully; don’t just hunt desperately for a good p-score to prove the hypothesis. Avoid cherry-picking and data mining for results and affect. Stay relevant, and promote good work that reflects well on your field. Don't forget social links! Distribute on channels you control as much as you can. Draw attention to your work with good posts and notices.
If you’re an author, remember that SEO is supposed to help you, not constrain you. Don’t let the fear of not being found change what you want to express artistically. Make your statement, and use every marketing tool available to help your personal vision get found. My books were never bestsellers—they weren’t designed to be. I wanted to make what I wanted to make, and have been happy with the expression for its own sake. Amazon has plenty of successful niches. Keep with it, and you’ll find yours.
Academic and Amazon SEO don’t have to be complicated things. While technical standards may change over time, people will always read, and there is always someone looking for what you research or write about. The real trick of internet content isn’t producing it, but helping it get found. A little due diligence on the optimization end can help your work find whatever niche or venue in belongs in, and yield substantial rewards.