J Korean Soc Med Inform.  2001 Dec;7(4):93-102.

Comparative Analysing English Subject Headings of Nursing Science Journals with MeSH in Korean Nursing Articles

• Kim JH
• Park HA

Abstract

This study was conducted to compare English keywords of articles published in major Korean Nursing Journals provided by the authors with the MeSH to see how often MeSH concepts are being used and suggest ways to improve use of the MeSH by Korean nurse researchers. Each English keyword provided by the author was compared with the MeSH concepts usign the MeSH browser. One thousand seven hundred eighty four articles published in 7 major Korean Nursing journals were reviewed. Only 44.2% (788 articles) out of 1,784 articles had at least one English keyword provided by the authors. There were total 2,137 English keywords used with 1,672 uniquely different keywords. Each article had 2.7 English keywords on the average. Twenty one point twenty nine percent of the English keywords matched with MeSH concepts. Reasons for not matching with MeSH concepts were that English keywords provided by the authors were unique nursing terminologies, psycho-social terminologies, phonetics of Korean words or pure Korean words. In order to have high quality bibliographical database, it is necessary to use standard keyword for indexing and searching nursing related literatures. This study recommends that use of a standard classification such as MeSH be included in the authors guideline for manuscript submission, keywords provided by authors be added or modified by the editor, and efforts to include those terms not matching with MeSH concepts into the MeSH classification be exercised.

Keyword

Subject headings; MeSH; Keywords

MeSH Terms

Abstracting and Indexing as Topic
Classification
Nursing*
Phonetics
Subject Headings*