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13.6 How should I select my key words?
In most journals, directly below the Abstract there is a list of key words. These are

for indexing purposes and will help your paper be identified more easily and thus
cited more frequently.

Ensure you check with your journal’s ‘instructions to authors’ to see how many key
words to include, and whether or not these can also be words that appear in the title
of your paper.

1. Read through your paper and underline the ‘technical’ terms that you’ve used

most frequently.
2. Check that the terms you’ve listed in (1) match the key technical terms used in

your specifi c field

3. Consider including variants / alternatives of some of the terms, and also their

acronyms
4. Include common abbreviations of terms (e.g., HIV).
5. Meet the criteria of indexing and abstracting services (see en.wikipedia.org/

wiki/Indexing_and_abstracting_service)
6. Type your chosen keywords into Google Scholar (or a similar search engine).

Do the results match your topic?
There is a lot of mystery around how Google and other search engines use key
words when indexing websites and articles. In any case it makes sense to have key
words in your abstract (and title too) because it forces you, the author, to decide
what words in your paper really are important. The key words are also the words
that readers are looking for in their initial search and then when they actually scan
your abstract. General consensus seems to be to not repeat the key words more than
three times in the abstract. This can be tedious for the reader. More importantly,
'keyword spamming' may lead to the web page being rejected by the search engine.