Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Keywords
Does anyone have a good strategy for choosing keywords for papers? I can never decide on the best 4-6 words that are informative but not already in the title or abstract. Sometimes I'm perplexed at the keywords on papers I read, so I think other people also find it challenging to pick good keywords.
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5 comments:
I guess I always thought that each journal had some list of keywords - of course that list would always have to be growing.
Wouldn't most of them need to come from the abstract? That narrows it down to a couple hundred! :p
I use keywords from the wider context of my work. Or the words from the conclusions of the paper ("this study is also relevant for x and y and z"). Sometimes I also try to not use certain words in my title but take them as keywords, especially when I would like to mention "A" in the title, but in fact I cannot prove "A", just sort of see a tendency towards "A".
I think about what keywords I would input into Pubmed (or your paper search engine of choice) to find a paper on this topic. I might also include variations on the same words, for example: GI tract, gastrointestinal tract- since people might search on either term.
I pick 2 words that are the main thing and in my title, pick 1 or 2 that are relevant to what I wanted to say, like Nina, and the rest with the words I would search the interwebs for
SF, it was been much easier if the journal did have a list!
Nina, I like your idea of using something from the conclusions. In the paper I'm about to submit, there will be some important stuff in the conclusions that doesn't much show up anywhere else.
CE, I have definitely been thinking about search terms, but having trouble deciding which ones to use.
Lin, I've been advised not to use words from the title since those will be redundant with the key words for search.
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