Q: Why do some researchers and teachers say that keywords should not be taken from the title?

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

Some researchers, teachers/professors, and journals stipulate this for a couple of reasons.

  • Titles and keywords have different purposes. Titles are meant to communicate the core of the research. Keywords are meant to make the research paper searchable.
  • Titles, being of limited length (and purpose, as we saw above), do not typically have all the key or important words and concepts of the paper. That’s where keywords come in: to supplement the information in the title.

If you were to take the keywords only from the title, you would have a limited number of keywords, thus reducing the chances of your paper being discovered.

Hope that helps. For more insights into keywords and titles, you may refer to these articles: