Importance of keywords for retrieval of relevant articles in medline search

Literature search is an important part of any research and publication activity. In the era of electronic database and explosion of scientific publication, keywords play an immense role in digging out the relevant published material, since these keywords act as "keys" to unlock the desired scientific paper abstracts/full articles from a vast collection of related publications1. Hence it is important to include and select pertinent keywords which can easily identify and search relevant references and filter-out the large body of unwanted material. It is, therefore, important that certain words may be added to the abstract of the article which a future researcher might be expected to use as keywords in MEDLINE search. These words should be such that they would make an article which might have remained invisible to the researcher visible on search2. It has been observed that the keywords included along with the abstracts by some journals in the research reports frequently do not identify relevant papers. In view of this problem we have analysed an issue of the Indian Journal of Pharmacology [2002; Vol 34 (Issue 1): 3-58] for the relevance of the keywords used.