Editors' Note: Keywords will improve the article impact and are now necessary for Journal of the Medical Library Association articles. Here is a brief editorial with background information.

When the editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) asked me to write a piece about author keywords in MEDLINE structured abstracts [ 1 ], the first thing I did was search for “keywords” in Google and Google Scholar. This exercise was reminiscent of the lithograph Drawing Hands by M. C. Escher [ 2 ]. Think about it. I used Google, an über-web search engine, to write keywords to find keywords. Google and Google Scholar returned a deluge of information (721 million and 4.35 million hits, respectively). Not surprisingly, at the top of the first page in Google were hits for Google AdWords and their Keyword Planner Tool [ 3 ].

I then did more focused searches in the ACL Anthology, a digital archive of papers in computational linguistics, and in Scientometrics or journals with similar coverage to confirm that keyword analysis is thriving in the text-mining and bibliometrics communities; for example, see Ventura and Silva [ 4 ] or Yao et al. [ 5 ].