Advice About How to Get Cited

Choosing a journal to court for publication
Get your book reviewed
Scrolling, the first challenge
Creating an effective title

The dynamics of article databases
Writing an effective abstract
Making sure your book is found: The importance of chapter titles

CHOOSING A JOURNAL TO COURT FOR PUBLICATION

There is no substitute for getting published in one of “the journals” everyone in your discipline reads. Here are a couple hints:

• In your article, have you cited multiple articles from a specific journal? Is so, that’s a good candidate.
• You can check ISI’s Journal Citation Reports to find journal impact factors.
• Sometimes, getting published in a high quality niche journal may be preferable. Don’t rule them out.

GET YOUR BOOK REVIEWED

Don’t be shy about asking the marketing representative of your press if they intend to send review copies to your favorite journals. Be sure that you get covered in Choice. This is the main book review journal that is used by academic libraries.

SCROLLING, THE FIRST CHALLENGE

Information overload is our problem these days. Most researchers use finding aids like article databases and library catalogs to locate information. Your work needs to jump out as relevant and significant during a rapid scroll through hundreds of citations. The Title is the Key!!!

CREATING AN EFFECTIVE TITLE

This is not the place to demonstrate your artistic/expressive nature. Titles should be informative. People need to know what your article or book is about based on the title alone. If you are working within a particular theoretical tradition, you can use some jargon or names, but make sure it will still make sense to a novice. The most important terms for describing your work should be in the title. Every word should serve a purpose. Some advice is, hand only your title to colleagues and see if they can figure out what your article or book is about.

THE DYNAMICS OF ARTICLE DATABASES

To maximize your chances of being found, you have to understand how article databases work. Keyword searching looks at the following fields: title, subject headings, author-supplied subject headings, and the abstract. Very few use relevancy ranking. Most use Boolean logic. For those that do use relevancy ranking, the title is given stronger weight, so the most important “search terms” should be in the title.

WRITING AN EFFECTIVE ABSTRACT

The abstract gives you the greatest opportunity to design a strategy that will get your article found.

Here is a sample strategy:

1. Write an informative abstract that tries to reduce the article to a paragraph. Try to make the abstract a substitute for reading the article. Summarize your conclusions, mention your methodology, mention any theoretical framework you are using, name the population studied on both the local and larger levels.
   
   
2. Think broadly and imagine every research area that your study would ideally influence and generate a list of relevant terms that these other researchers might use in a search. Revise your abstract, trying to insert these thoughts and words.
   
   
3. After you have a draft that is a good reduction and will draw in researchers that are outside of your primary field, look over your abstract for any repeated words. Look for synonyms, including some field specific terms or jargon, if appropriate. Use broader and narrower terms. Each word is taking up prime real estate. Make it work for you.

MAKING SURE YOUR BOOK IS FOUND: THE IMPORTANCE OF CHAPTER TITLES

Library catalogs are the main finding aid for books. The main topic fields that are searched in a library catalog are: title, series title, table of contents, and sometimes summaries from the book jacket.

Go ahead and write an abstract for the book and submit it to the publisher. Maybe it will get used for the book jacket.

For each chapter title, think of it as a separate entity and follow the suggestions for the title of the whole work. You want each chapter to be capable of being found on its own.

Go back and look at the titles and the chapter titles. If words are repeated, look for synonyms.