title: Every scientist is a memory researcher: Suggestions for making research more memorable.
abstract: Independent of the actual results, some scientific articles are more memorable than others. As anyone who has written an article collaboratively knows, there are numerous ways a manuscript can be written to convey the same general ideas. To aid with this, many scientific writing books and editorials provide advice, often anecdotal, on how to make articles more memorable. Here I ground these suggestions with empirical support from memory research. Specifically, I suggest that researchers consider how to emphasize their work's novelty, strive to describe their work using concrete, easy-to-understand terms, and use caution when attempting to evoke an emotional response in the reader. I also discuss considerations in title selections and conference presentations.
authors: Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E9, Canada ; Department of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA.
authors: Christopher R
authors: CR
authors: Madan
keywords: citation frequency; memory; publishing; scholarly communication; scientific writing