Choosing the right keywords
If you have taken time and trouble to write an academic article or other published work, you will want others to be able to find it.
In our computerized world, this means selecting the best keywords. Rather than choosing randomly, you can increase the odds that readers will find your work by some simple approaches. The websites of most academic journals will offer guidelines on how many keywords their editors expect. Assume at least a half dozen keywords will be needed.
Do not duplicate words in your title.
The words in your title will already be searched in any index. Keywords are meant to supplement the title. Look through what you have written for the terms that are repeated the most. These might be good candidates for keywords.
Use synonyms and international terms.
If you have written a study of stamp collecting, you might add “numismatics,” another term for this activity, as a keyword. Look up synonyms. Also keep in mind that your article may be read by those most familiar with either British or American English, so tailor your keywords to satisfy both of these groups of readers. If you are writing about elevators (for the American reader) be sure to include lift, the British term, as a keyword. There are many guides online to British vs. American vocabulary, which can be Googled:
https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/british-american.htm
Check a standard index to see if your keywords are commonly used.
Whatever your field of study, there should be an established form of indexing for it. The indexing structure of any subject is designed so that a variety of writers will use common terms for ideas and subjects. If you search the website for a given term, you should find alternate, more precise, or related terms suggested as further choices. If you cannot find a keyword that you were planning to use, check some of the articles in your bibliography on the indexing website. You will see how older articles have been classified, and what keywords are used to identify them. You may wish to select some keywords based on how these previous examples were pinpointed. If you are still not finding the keywords you want, it can help to check synonyms or different forms of words to see if the indexing website takes note of them. You may also be making the mistake of using non-standard or Thai-style English which is not recognized in international databases.
Test your choices before deciding on a final selection.
At any time during the process of choosing keywords, plug them into an academic index which you are accustomed to using. You will immediately see if the terms are widely accepted by the search engine in question. Also, the results that are brought up from your sample keywords should be about the subject of your research. If for some reason they are not, then you can revise your list until a search brings up results that are closer to what you are working on. In this way, you can pinpoint results to keywords searches before making a final selection of your own keywords.
How to optimize academic search engines.
More and more researchers really care about how many people see their articles and cite them. Indeed, the value of some research is measured by how much influence it has on readers and whether it makes waves in the academic world. Funding and careers are based on this kind of data, so naturally people in universities take it very seriously, and approach it with a somewhat businesslike or commercial point of view. Following this trend, the Google AdWords keyword tool can give you an idea beforehand what keywords are most successful in online searches:
https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
You do not have to subscribe to or pay for this service to get some basic data from Google AdWords, but you will have to sign up for it. In exchange, you may have a better idea of what readers internationally are looking for online, and how to frame your own message so that the maximum number of people see it. There are also Google Insights and Google Trends:
These functions will let you know how popular keywords are over a certain time and by location. You may not care about this information, or it may be useful depending on your field of study and the nature of your publication. In any case, it is always best to choose keywords that exactly describe what you are doing, rather than selecting one because it is popular but only partly applicable to your subject.
Keywords can be phrases.
You do not need to select only single words as keywords. You can choose a term with more than one word, such as “ice age.” Also, since you will not know whether a reader will search for SET or spell out the term “Stock Exchange of Thailand,” choose both as keywords, if that is your subject matter. Your reader may not have your specialized knowledge of a subject, so rather than an acronym such as TNA, it is better to spell out the whole term, Thailand News Agency. Be as plain and direct as possible.
Avoid specialized vocabulary.
Your keywords are meant to be helpful to the widest range of potential readers, so do not use very rare terminology that only advanced students in your subject will have heard of. You might try asking a fellow student or ajarn who is studying in a different field if he or she has heard of your keyword choice. If they have no idea what you are talking about, then the keyword you were planning to use may be too rarified.
(all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)