Professional Development


53 - Key words
Some journals request that authors provide and identify 3 to 10 key words or short phrases that identify the main topics of the article, placed right after the abstract. This helps indexers in cross-indexing the article and the key words may be published with the abstract. Use terminology from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) list of Index Medicus. MeSH is the vocabulary controlled by the (U.S.) National Library of Medicine used for indexing articles in PubMed. MeSH terminology provides a consistent way to retrieve information that may use different terminology for the same concepts. Using the MeSH database to find MeSH Terms may help in a search strategy. Therefore, MeSH should be considered when selecting the key words for a manuscript.If suitable MeSH terms are not yet available for recently introduced terms, you may use the current prevailing terms.