Effective writing and publishing scientific papers, part II: Title and abstract

摘要

The title and abstract are the most important parts of a paper. They are important for editors who will scan the title and abstract to decide if it should be sent out for external peer review; for reviewers, who will get a first impression of the paper; and for readers, as the title, abstract, and keywords are often the only parts of the paper that are freely accessible to everyone online, including readers in developing countries. Electronic search databases use words in the title and abstract to yield search results. In PubMed, the similarity between documents is measured by the words they have in common, and terms in the title are given more weight. It is therefore essential that the title and abstract contain all the important terms that potential readers may use in searching for relevant literature and "related articles."