How do authors select keywords? A preliminary study of author keyword selection behavior

Abstract Author keywords for scientific literature are terms selected and created by authors. Although most studies have focused on how to apply author keywords to represent their research interests, little is known about the process of how authors select keywords. To fill this research gap, this study presents a pilot study on author keyword selection behavior. Our empirical results show that the average percentages of author keywords appearing in titles, abstracts, and both titles and abstracts are 31%, 52.1%, and 56.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, we find that keywords also appear in references and high-frequency keywords. The proportions of author-selected keywords appearing in the references and high-frequency keywords are 41.6% and 56.1%, respectively. In addition, keywords of papers written by core authors (productive authors) are found to appear less frequently in titles and abstracts in their papers than that of others, and appear more frequently in references and high-frequency keywords. The percentages of keywords appearing in titles and abstracts in scientific papers are negatively correlated with citation counts of papers. In contrast, the percentages of author keywords appearing in high-frequency keywords are positively associated with citation counts of papers.

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