The Ulutas Medical Journal p-ISSN 2149-0430 e-ISSN 2149-388X

How your article gets read and cited

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An article is cited only after someone finds it, opens it and finds it useful. You cannot control the last step, but you can do a lot for the first two. This guide covers what helps people find your work, the identifiers that connect it to you, how to share it legally, and the shortcuts that harm your reputation.

Discoverability starts with the title and abstract

Search engines and databases read your title and abstract first. ICMJE describes the title as a distilled description of the article that, together with the abstract, should make electronic retrieval both sensitive and specific. It also points out that in many databases the abstract is the only substantive part of the article that is indexed, and the only part many readers read. PubMed, for example, lets users search the title and abstract fields directly.

In practice:

  • Use the words your readers would type: the disease, the intervention, the population and the study design (reporting guidelines such as STROBE ask for the design in the title or abstract).
  • Avoid abbreviations in the title and abstract; the EASE guidelines for authors advise keeping them out of the abstract and defining them at first use.
  • Make the abstract complete on its own, with the main numbers and the main conclusion, and make sure it matches the main text.
  • Choose keywords from MeSH, the National Library of Medicine's vocabulary; this journal asks for MeSH keywords for original articles (see the Instructions for Authors).

Google Scholar says it ranks documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text, where it was published, who wrote it, and how often and how recently it has been cited. A clear title and abstract help with the first of these.

ORCID, DOI and author profiles

Many authors publish under more than one form of their name (with or without Turkish letters, with or without a middle name). Google Scholar notes that if you publish under several names you may need several searches to collect your articles, and ORCID suggests recording name variants and your affiliation so that you can be told apart from people with similar names. Persistent identifiers help:

  • ORCID iD – a free identifier for you as a researcher. This journal asks for the ORCID iDs of all authors on the title page. When a journal sends your ORCID iD to Crossref with the article's metadata, Crossref can add the article to your ORCID record automatically once you give permission. See our guide on getting an ORCID iD.
  • DOI – a permanent link to the article. Crossref explains that publishers keep the registered location up to date, so the DOI keeps working if the article moves. Always share the DOI link rather than a copied PDF address.
  • Author profiles – a Google Scholar profile collects your articles and their citations in one place; our guide on Google Scholar profiles explains how to set one up and keep it clean.

Sharing your article legally

This journal publishes open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0), and authors keep the copyright. Under CC BY 4.0 anyone may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, provided they give appropriate credit, link to the licence and indicate if changes were made.

The journal's Self-Archiving Policy allows you to deposit any version of your article (preprint, accepted manuscript or published version) in an institutional or subject repository or on a personal website, without embargo, with an acknowledgement of publication and a link to the article's DOI. Google Scholar also suggests depositing papers in an institutional repository or on a personal website, while following the publisher's requirements.

Good ways to share:

  • deposit the published PDF in your university's repository;
  • add the article to your ORCID record and Google Scholar profile;
  • send the DOI link to colleagues who work on the same question;
  • mention the article, with its DOI, when you present the work at meetings.

For articles in other journals, check that journal's own licence and self-archiving rules before uploading anything.

What not to do

Some ways of increasing citation counts are treated as misconduct. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) describes citation manipulation as citing work mainly to inflate citation counts rather than for its scholarly content. Its discussion document gives examples:

  • excessive self-citation – citing your own papers mainly to raise your counts;
  • excessive journal self-citation – citing many articles from the journal you submit to, mainly to raise its counts;
  • citation stacking – coordinated, excessive citation of a particular author or journal;
  • coercive citation – reviewers or editors making citations to their own work a condition of acceptance.

ICMJE adds that references should not be used to promote self-interest and that authors should avoid citing articles in predatory or pseudo-journals. Cite your earlier work when it is genuinely relevant, cite original research rather than abstracts where possible, and never cite a paper you have not read. If a reviewer asks you to add citations that do not fit your article, you may say so politely in your response letter and tell the editor.

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