Research-backed guides to optimising your paper's discoverability on Google Scholar, PubMed, and AI search engines, plus comprehensive NIH grant-writing resources for principal investigators.
Top-quartile discoverability associates with 7% more citations at 5 years (95% CI 4–11%). Naming a method in the title is the strongest lever (+0.31 on log-fitness, p=0.001). Opening the abstract with a descriptive hedge hurts. Title length, readability, and jargon density did not come through at this sample size. The within-stratum matched-pair test is null, a meaningful caveat, not explained away.
AI Search & DiscoveryA primary-source review of Generative Engine Optimisation for biomedical papers. Nine tactics tested in Aggarwal et al. (KDD 2024), the four that lift visibility 28% or more (quotation, statistics, cite sources, fluency), the one that hurts it (keyword stuffing), and what is being sold to researchers that the evidence does not support.
Grant WritingEverything a PI needs to write a competitive NIH grant proposal, from Specific Aims to post-award compliance. R01 success rates hit 13% in FY2025. This guide covers what separates funded from unfunded applications.
Grant WritingThe single most important page of your application. The four-paragraph structure, the fatal errors that sink proposals, and how the Simplified Peer Review Framework changed what reviewers look for.
Grant WritingThe 12-page scientific core of the R01. How Significance and Innovation now feed a single scored factor, why negative preliminary data can be more persuasive than positive, and where most applications lose points.
Grant WritingThe Simplified Peer Review Framework replaced five criteria with three factors. How scoring works, what percentiles mean, why programme officers are your most underused resource, and how paylines vary by institute.
Grant WritingA1 resubmissions succeed at 20–30%, double the A0 rate. How to read your summary statement, write a non-defensive Introduction to Resubmission, and know when not to resubmit at all.
Grant WritingStarting January 2026, SciENcv is mandatory and ORCID must be linked. What changed under NOT-OD-26-018, how to prepare a biosketch that strengthens your application, and the leniency period through May 2026.
Grant WritingModular vs. detailed budgets, personnel effort calculations, equipment vs. supplies, consortium costs, and why budget–narrative misalignment tells reviewers you haven't thought the project through.
Grant WritingAt NIH, programme staff review the DMSP for compliance. At NSF, reviewers score it as part of merit review. What a strong plan includes, how FAIR findability applies, and the mistakes that create post-award problems.
Grant WritingFont sizes, page limits, expired FOAs, PDF rendering failures, and the three different validation systems that can each reject your application for different reasons. The administrative errors that kill grants before review.
Grant WritingThe Leadership Plan is now evaluated under Factor 3 as pass/fail. A generic letter of support hurts you. Budget allocation signals whether collaboration is real. What reviewers actually look for in multi-PI grants.
Grant WritingNon-compliance with Public Access Policy can block ALL your future grants. Effort reporting is the most audited area. No-cost extensions must be requested before expiration. What PIs need to know after the award.
AI Search & DiscoveryA reviewer-grade measurement of the top 50 biomedical journals by h-index. Only PLoS ONE, EMBO J, JCI, NeuroImage, and Chemical Society Reviews are simultaneously reachable by a polite research crawler and declared open to GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended in robots.txt. The other 45 are blocked by one of two distinct mechanisms.
Grant ComplianceNIH, NSF, DOE, and Horizon Europe now require research outputs to be findable under FAIR principles. This is not about open access, it is about metadata, persistent identifiers, and whether your paper can actually be discovered.
Search UpdatesAI Overviews now appear in 51% of healthcare searches but cite primary research in just 0.48% of cases. What changed in March 2026, what it means for bioRxiv and medRxiv, and a practical checklist for PIs.
Research VisibilityPeer-reviewed studies, the Elsevier settlement, the MDPI controversy, and why the Research Interest Score should not be in your tenure dossier. A 2026 review drawn from the actual literature.
Original ResearchWe asked an AI 100 biomedical questions and tracked every paper it cited. 94% were real PubMed papers with a median of 1,365 citations. Here's what determines whether AI cites your research.
Google ScholarYour paper is on Google Scholar, but when someone searches your topic, your competitor's paper appears first. Here's what the ranking algorithm weighs and what you can control.
Core Academic SEOA step-by-step checklist for optimising your research paper's discoverability, from title and abstract keywords to preprint posting and Google Scholar profile setup.
Metadata & TechnicalYour ResearchGate profile has reads but not enough. Learn how the algorithm works, how to optimise your profile and publications, and cross-platform strategies that compound visibility.
Original ResearchOriginal 4-field PubMed study. Using common terms in your title does not raise citations. Declarative titles do, by ~33% in median citations, in every field and at every length.
Original ResearchOriginal PubMed data: clinical relevance language was the strongest predictor of citations. Structured abstracts showed no advantage. Data on length, readability, and quantitative content.
Original ResearchOriginal PubMed data analysis: declarative titles have 3.5x the median citations. Data on title length, structure type, gene names, and methodology keywords across 423 papers.
Core Academic SEOWhat academic search engine optimisation is, why it matters, and how to make your research discoverable across Google Scholar, PubMed, and AI search engines.
Google ScholarThe confirmed and suspected factors that determine where your paper ranks in Google Scholar search results.
Citations & ImpactA diagnostic guide to the most common reasons research papers fail to accumulate citations, and how to fix each one.
AI Search & DiscoveryHow AI search engines select which papers to cite, and what you can do to make your research AI-citation-ready.
Title & AbstractWhat the evidence says about how your paper's title affects citation count, discoverability, and Google Scholar ranking.
Title & AbstractA practical framework for writing abstracts that rank higher in academic search engines.
Preprint StrategyHow to optimise your bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint for maximum discoverability before journal publication.
Google ScholarWhat Google's new AI-powered Scholar Labs means for how your papers are discovered and surfaced.
Metadata & TechnicalWhy figure captions are an overlooked SEO opportunity and how to write them for discoverability.
Readability & Plain LanguageEvidence that plain language summaries increase views and citations, plus a step-by-step writing framework.
Career & TenureA strategic guide to maximising citation impact during the postdoc years, when every paper counts.
Competitor GapWhy language editing and search optimisation are complementary but different services.
Citations & ImpactA balanced analysis of the evidence for and against the open access citation advantage.
Google ScholarStep-by-step guide to setting up and optimising your Google Scholar profile.
Readability & Plain LanguageWhat the evidence says about the relationship between readability and citation count.
Career & TenureWhy journal impact factor is an incomplete measure and what alternative metrics tenure committees actually value.