In ToothAid School, our articles serve an important purpose: to provide answer to the public’s query through web searches. The importance of this is that the search engines (like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others) are improving their search algorithms from time to time to provide the best answer for the people who are searching for answers through internet browser.
While writing an interesting article is appealing and self-satisfactory, it is equally important to include relevance and suitability. In another words, a good article is the article that readers want to read, not so much on what you want to write (click here if you want to learn from us: Guidelines for writing article which can get high ranking).
Preparing Article
Article formatting
This section offers a general format or the style of the article in ToothAid School. Although it is not a requirement, we encourage the authors to follow the recommended format. We have prepared a Word.doc template for your convenience.
Article Title
An article title should express the reader’s query clearly. This title will appear as the highlighted biggest text in a search result (as shown in the picture).
As you see a long title would usually get its tail cut away, it is good to keep the number of words in the title under 11 words.
Sometimes, a “power word” would add attractiveness and this was shown to increase “click” of an article. (click here to see the list of power word).
Article Content: Headings
Next we are at the content section. Heading is like the small title for the topic of your single article. You can have few topics in an article, each started with a heading. This way, your article is organized well and your readers could read and look for relevant answer with ease. A typical article would have 3-6 topics.
Sometimes you will have subtopics for a topic. Likewise, the subtopics will be labelled with subheadings. Therefore the structure of an article is in a hierarchy, a big heading for each topic, and smaller subheadings for the subtopic. In HTML’s language, they are represented by H1, H2, H3, H4, in an descending order of hierarchy (shown in picture below). H1 is usually the title and H2 is used for the topic heading.
Therefore, when you are writing the heading, be sure to choose H1, H2, H3…, instead of the normal text or paragraph (p). This is important when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). The search engine like Google does not see your content visually like how we human see with our eyes. They “crawl” the content in computer languages. They understand your article structure through the Headings labels.
Article Content: Paragraphs
Paragraphs are the explanations or elaborations of a topic, so they are placed under the headings. The paragraphs should be reader’s friendly so that the eyes will not be strained by unlimited rows of words. It is a good practice to bold highly relevant phrase or sentence in your paragraph to show emphasis. Search engine understands emphasis too.
Generally, an introduction without heading is given as the beginning paragraph. Then, the topics are written in the middle of the article. At the end, conclusion is laid down and reference is given as the last heading (shown below). The recommended length of the article is 600 – 1500 words.
Article Content: Reference
A reference list should be provided at the end of the article (after the Conclusion). Click here to jump to Referencing.
Table of Content
A table of content will be convenient shown at the side of the published article (or a dropdown in mobile device). The table of content contains the headings of your articles so that readers can navigate through with ease. As author, you do not need to insert any table of content. It will be automatically created.
English corrections
We do not have grammar checking tool built into the system. We strongly recommend the authors to perform grammar and spell check through third party tools like Grammarly. Just create an account in Grammarly, copy and paste in your content, suggestion for improvement will be given.
Preparing Figures and Tables
Figures
Figures used in the oral health articles are used for few purposes including illustrating content, providing attractive look, showing facts in infographics…There are commonly two sources of figures:
Self-created figures
These figures are owned by the creator. The creator is free to put them onto the content. . A faint watermark with ToothAid School logo is recommended to be placed at the background to prevent copyright issue. However, the published creation will not be protected by ToothAid School by law because ToothAid School has not obtained materials’ copyright license as for now.
Common creative licensed figures
These figures are usually photographs created for the public use. The creators upload their photographs and allow anyone to use, with one condition: to credit their name under in the caption of the picture (below the picture).
You can find the pictures in pexels.com, unsplash.com, flickr.com. Whenever you download the pictures, you will be asked to credit the creator. To do that, copy the link and paste it under the pictures in your article. We will help to insert it into the caption and you will be safe.
The size of the image to be uploaded must be below 100KB. If it exceeds this, you can compress it using online tool like picresize.com
Tables
Tables usually present facts and numbers. Whenever it is copied or referred from other sources, write the reference below the table and in the Reference list (after conclusion).
Referencing
Oral health articles should be evidence-based whenever facts are given. The evidence should be cited well.
References should be prepared according to Vancouver reference style. All references should be numbered consecutively in order of appearance and should be as complete as possible. In-text citations should cite references in consecutive order using Arabic superscript numerals.
Submission by File
By using the file submission system, you cannot save as draft and edit later. Only upload your file when your article is ready for submission. We encourage you to write using our template file (download here).
1. Prepare your article according to the Article formatting in the above section.
2. Using the template file, write your article title.
3. Write the content in a hierarchical form: Headings and Paragraphs.
4. Whenever you insert a photo, insert the source link under the photo (if you are using creative common pictures).
5. When your document is ready, click on the Submission menu on the left, “Submit article”
6. Write the article title, and upload your document.
7. Add a featured image as the cover of your article. This makes your article looks more appealing. It will also be used when publishing in the social media.
8. Choose a category for your article from the dropdown list.
9. Select uncategorized if your category is not listed. Then, suggest a new category.
10. Write the remarks for the Editor saying that this is a new article or resubmission of edited article.
11. Click “Submit for review” when you are ready to submit.
Editorial Procedures and Review Process
Initial checks
All submitted articles received by the Editorial will be checked by a professional in-house Editor to determine whether they are properly prepared. Articles that do not meet the standard will be returned to the authors for revision and resubmission. Once it is checked, it will be published onto the website (Articles section). It is not necessary to wait for the review process for publication.
The reason for publishing before reviewing is because the published articles usually take 1 to 2 months to be discovered and “crawled” by the search engine. This means that the published articles could only appear in the web searches after 1 to 2 months. Therefore, once accepted by the Editor, it is decided to publish into the web first, followed by the expert review. Any revision needed after that could be made later on.
Review Process
Once an article is checked by Editor and accepted for publishing, it will be sent to the professional expert for review process. An email notification will be sent to the author.
Each article will be reviewed by one reviewer. The article would be reviewed by the professional expert of the related field. When the review process is done, the author will be notified, and reviewer’s report will be sent to the author through email. The author will make necessary modification and resubmit to the Editorial. The article will then be updated and the reviewer’s name will be stated below the author’s name.