Choosing Keywords for your Manuscript

Category: Education

Publishing an academic paper in journals makes the study known to the readers. Keywords play an important role in a research manuscript. The list of keywords helps readers and search engines to easily find your article, if it is relevant to the topic they are looking for. Although it might seem secondary to article writing, it is necessary to make your study accessible to audiences and other people in the field. Keywords, as the name suggests, is a key to information. Keywords guide researchers to relevant papers—papers that may not come to a researcher’s notice during the normal course of reading. Relevant papers may remain unnoticed as they might be published in journals that a particular researcher does not read frequently. Even if such papers are published in journals that a researcher reads frequently, he may not realize that those papers are relevant to the topic he is searching for because their titles may be different and do not indicate their relevance. Therefore, selecting appropriate keywords is important, because these are used for indexing purposes. Furthermore, selecting appropriate keywords enables your article to be more easily identified and cited. Occasionally, you may have to select keywords from a list, which is already prepared, of most commonly used keywords, whereas several journals may accept a personalized list. Therefore, you must be careful in selecting the keywords. The major function of keywords is to retrieve information. Indexing and abstracting services, search engines, and journals categorize papers using keywords. Therefore, an appropriate list of keywords will ensure correct indexing and facilitate in showing your article to the interested group, thus increasing the opportunity of your article being cited. Protocol to Select Appropriate Keywords for your Manuscript: Read the manuscript thoroughly and list down the terms/phrases that are used repetitively in the paper. Ensure that all the main key terms/phrases and a few more key phrases are included. Include variants of a term, drug names, procedures, common abbreviations, etc. Then, refer to a common vocabulary/term list or indexing standard in your discipline (e.g., ERIC Thesaurus, ChemWeb, GeoRef, BIOSIS Search Guide, PsycInfo, MeSH Thesaurus) and ensure that the terms you have used match those used in these resources. Finally, before submitting the article, type the keywords into a search engine and check if the results that show up match the subject area of your paper. This will help in determining whether the keywords in the academic paper are appropriate for the topic of your article. Ensure to include one of your keywords in the first 90 characters and also in the first and in the last paragraph. This is especially useful if we take into account the way that search engines work.