How many keywords do authors assign to research articles – a multi-disciplinary analysis?

Mao, Jin; Lu, Kun; Zhao, Wanying; Cao, Yujie

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/100269 Copy

Description

Title

How many keywords do authors assign to research articles – a multi-disciplinary analysis?

Author(s)

• Mao, Jin
• Lu, Kun
• Zhao, Wanying
• Cao, Yujie

Issue Date

2018

Keyword(s)

• author keywords
• keyword frequency distribution
• co-word analysis
• distribution fitting

Abstract

Author keywords are one important data source for co-word analysis. The distri-bution of author keywords in papers has not been investigated at the discipline level. We analyzed six research fields from soft science to hard science to reveal the underlying quantitative patterns of author keywords. Normal distribution, Poisson distribution, and Weibull distribution were fitted by applying Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Chi-Square tests and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests were used to evaluate the goodness of fit. The results show that a large portion of pa-pers have no keyword or only one keyword in all these fields. The author key-word distributions of the six fields are represented. It’s shown that Weibull dis-tribution is the best fitted. This study provides practical implications for keyword selection in co-word analysis.

Publisher

iSchools

Series/Report Name or Number

iConference 2018 Proceedings

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/100269

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2018 is held by Jin Mao, Kun Lu, Wanying Zhao, Yujie Cao. Copyright permissions, when appropriate, must be obtained directly from the authors.

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