Examining Scientific Vocabulary: Mapping Controlled Vocabularies with Free Text Keywords

Scientific repositories create a new environment for studying traditional information science issues. The interaction between indexing terms provided by users and controlled vocabularies continues to be an area of debate and study. This article reports and analyzes findings from a study that mapped the relationships between free text keywords and controlled vocabulary terms used in the sciences. Based on this study’s findings recommendations are made about which vocabularies may be better to use in scientific data repositories.