Dress Your Paper for the Job It Wants

This presentation explores the critical role of titles and abstracts in academic writing and research dissemination. It demonstrates how poorly designed titles and abstracts can reduce a paper’s visibility, credibility, and impact, even before the full text is read. Through practical examples from information technology and cybersecurity research, the presentation identifies common mistakes, explains how researchers discover academic papers, and provides clear strategies for creating concise, specific, and searchable titles as well as structured, informative abstracts. The material emphasizes the importance of discoverability in scholarly communication and offers a practical checklist that students and early-career researchers can apply when preparing academic manuscripts for publication.