The metatextual functions of keywords inside a research article

Ekimov Mark A.

This article describes the metatextual functions of keywords inside research articles. The metatext itself has several definitions, including the definition of a text about or inside another text. Following that definition, the keyword group which precedes the body of a research paper can be defined as the secondary text or a text about another text. The research material contains 20 articles in Russian language published in VAK peer-reviewed journals, including 10 articles from journals of human sciences and 10 articles from journals of natural sciences. At the first stage of the research all words and phrases, which are included in keyword groups preceding every article, were extracted from body texts. This stage was followed by the quantitative processing of the extracted information and the comparative analysis of keywords and keyphrases mention frequency. The results showed that keywords distribution per article was on average 5.05 words per article. Keywords are generally characterized by the high repeatability inside the text. At the same time the total amount of all keywords mentions varies in texts. The tags, or the words which are defined preliminary as keywords but are not mentioned in the body text of an article, play a specific role inside any keywords group. The use of tags as keywords is more typical for humanities research articles than for natural science research articles.

Keywords:metatext, metatextual functions, research article, keyword group, tags.