Comparison of Intellectual Structure of Knowledge in International Journal of Preventive Medicine with MeSH: A Co‑Word Analysis

Abstract

Background: The aim of the current study is to determine the Comparison of intellectual structure of
International Journal of Preventive Medicine (IJPM) with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) based
on author keywords and index terms of Scopus database and the degree of compatibility among
these two groups of keywords.

Methods: This study was carried out using a co‑word technique,
which is one of the bibliometric methods. The study population consisted of 1104 articles published
in IJPM and indexed in Scopus database. After retrieval the articles, data for co‑word analyses
was extracted using UCINET and VOSviewer software applications and centrality criteria. Then,
the compatibility of author keywords and MeSH terms was examined by Jaccard’s similarity index.

Results: During the investigated years and among 2402 author keywords, on average, 561 author
keywords (23.36%) were exact matches, 417 author keywords (17.36%) were partial matches, and
1424 author keywords (59.28%) were not matched with the terms contained in the index. Author
keywords matching or not matching with index‑term categories formed the largest portion of partial
match keywords.

Conclusions: The use of MeSH as a standard tool by medical journals for the
selection of keywords in scientific publications could improve the visibility and retrieval of articles,
and increase the number of citations and journals’ impact factor.

Keywords: Abstracting and indexing as topic, knowledge, medical subject headings