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

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.