The Key to Keywords in Academic and Medical Writing

Julia Barber, PharmD
5 min readJul 15, 2020

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How to Hone Keyword Development and Ensure Your Article Populates in Relevant Searches

Purpose of keywords

Keywords in academic manuscripts are not simply important words in your paper. They should also be indexed terms. Indexed terms use specific phrasing with predefined meanings that are used by research databases (e.g., MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE, and Cochrane Library) to enhance the relevance of search results when researchers or other individuals perform a literature search (Searching solutions, 2020).

Journal guidelines for keywords

Many academic journals require keywords to be included with manuscript submissions. Keyword requirements are usually described in the specific journal’s author guidelines. These may include a minimum and maximum number of keywords, American or British spelling preferences, and capitalization formatting. An example of keyword requirements is below.

Keyword requirements from the European Journal of Pharmacology

Indexed terms

MEDLINE, CINAHL, and Cochrane Library, some of the most commonly used databases to search medical literature, use indexed terms referred to as Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) terms. EMBASE uses Emtree subject headings, which include MeSH terms (Guide to using Embase, 2020). However, Google Scholar and Web of Science do not use indexed terms (Searching solutions, 2020).

When creating keywords for your article, it can be useful to select already indexed terms to ensure that your paper populates in relevant searches. It may be better to use MeSH terms rather than Emtree subject headings, since MeSH terms are included in the most popular research databases and can yield relevant results in databases that do not use indexed terms. You can search for MeSH terms using the following link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/.

How to identify MeSH terms to use as keywords

Journals often request a list of three to six keywords. These terms should be pertinent to the main topic of the article, including the population, intervention, and outcomes.

Keywords should not only relate to the main topic of your paper but also be terms that would help someone searching the literature for this topic find your paper.

For example, if you evaluated a treatment for Wilms tumor, a tumor that predominantly affects children, you could include the MeSH terms “medical oncology,” “Wilms tumor,” and “pediatrics” as keywords in your manuscript.

When you first search the MeSH database, you may find that there are no search results. If this occurs, try using synonyms of that term or typing part of the term and review the list of suggested terms that populate as you type. In some cases, the database will populate the closest term to your search. For example, if you search the term “cancer,” the MeSH database will provide hundreds of terms, with “neoplasms” as the first result.

All indexed terms have a definition that you can use to confirm the term is appropriate for what your paper describes. Below is an image of how the search results and definitions appear. You can see that neoplasms refers to “new abnormal growth tissue.”

MeSH search result for “cancer” and definition of “neoplasms”

Now, you would like to add a keyword to describe the type of treatment that you tested, you may search the term “chemotherapy.” This search yields the general term “drug therapy,” which includes the term “antineoplastic agents” in its definition.

MeSH search result for “chemotherapy”

Therefore, you could use the term “antineoplastic agents” as a keyword. The search results from “chemotherapy” also provides a list of more specific terms underneath the umbrella term drug therapy, including “chemotherapy, adjuvant,” “induction chemotherapy,” and “maintenance chemotherapy,” from which you can choose. See the images below.

Partial list of terms under “drug therapy”

You can also use the generic name of the drug(s) used in your study. Continuing with the example, you may use “dactinomycin,” which happens to already be indexed in MEDLINE and would make an excellent keyword.

One of the most important aspects of a study are the outcomes, and the use of an indexed term for the outcome of your study may increase the ability of researchers to find a study like yours. In our example, you may have evaluated survival outcomes. You search “progression-free survival,” and discover this is a MeSH term. If you evaluated a different survival outcome that is not already a MeSH term, you could search the term “outcome” and find a relevant term, such as “treatment outcome.”

Finally, the list of keywords for this example manuscript would be medical oncology, Wilms tumor, pediatrics, maintenance chemotherapy, dactinomycin, and progression-free survival. If a researcher searches the literature for an article about Wilms tumor treatments after your manuscript is published, they would likely find your article in their search.

If you have any questions or comments about keywords, I would enjoy hearing from you.

If you like the text you read above and would like to have the same editor review your work, contact me about my editing and proofreading services at PharmDEdits@gmail.com or message me on my Facebook page.

References

Embase: Guide to using Embase — an international biomedical and pharmaceutical database. (2020, May 13). University of Toledo Libraries. Retrieved July 15, 2020 from https://libguides.utoledo.edu/Embase_Guide/Emtree

Searching Solutions: Keywords vs Indexed: Understanding how searching changes from search engine to database. (2020, Apr 7). Retrieved July 15, 2020 from https://libguides.usc.edu/c.php?g=631331&p=4459632

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Julia Barber, PharmD

I am a licensed pharmacist, medical editor, and medical writer. Follow me on IG @PharmDEdits and Facebook at Facebook.com/PharmDEdits.