28 十一 04 Functions of Keywords and Ten Ways to Select
Functions of Keywords:
(1) allow readers to decide whether or not an article contains material relevant to their interests;
(2) provide readers with suitable terms to use in webbased searches to locate other materials on the same or similar topics;
(3) help indexers/editors to group together related materials in, say, the end-of-year issues of a particular journal or a set of conference proceedings;
(4) allow editors/researchers to document changes in a subject discipline over time (although not everyone agrees with this, see Leydesdorff [1]); and
(5) link the specific issues of concern to issues at higher meta (abstraction) levels (see Appendix 1 for an example).
How to select effective keywords
(1) Use simple, specific noun clauses. For example, use variance estimation, not estimate of variance. (2) Avoid terms that are too common. Otherwise the number of ‘hits’ will be too large to manage.
(3) Do not repeat key words from the title. These will be picked up anyway.
(4) Avoid unnecessary prepositions, especially in and of. For example, use data quality rather than quality of data.
(5) Avoid acronyms. Acronyms can fall out of favour, and be puzzling to beginners and/or overseas readers.
(6) Spell out Greek letters and avoid mathematical symbols. These are impractical for computerbased searches.
(7) Include only the names of people as key words if they are part of an established terminology, e.g. Skinner box, Poisson distribution.
(8) Include where applicable mathematical or computer techniques, such as ‘generating function’, sed to derive results, and the statistical philosophy
or approach such as ‘maximum likelihood’, or ‘Bayes’ theory’.
(9) Include alternative or inclusive terminology. If a concept is or has been known by different terminologies, use a key word that might help a user conducting a search across a time-span, or from outside your speciality. For example, the statistician’s ‘characteristic function’ is the mathematician’s ‘Fourier transform’; and in some countries ‘educational administration’ is ‘educational management’.
(10) Note areas of applications where appropriate.
From Journal of Information Science,2003,29(5) ,by James Hartley
随机日志：
Leave a Comment
