Prevalent errors in writing keywords of dental articles

Dear Editor, All of the leading national and international medical journals make emphasis on some standards, in a section provided as a writing guide. This ensures their survival in those valid databases, which make the content of their articles visible. Two general standards are always considered, in this respect. First, applying Vancouver style for a description of bibliographic resources; and second, making use of MeSH for selection of keywords.[1] Emphasis on observing these two standards has been made to the level that, in numerous research performed during the past few years, level of considering these two standards has been considered as a basis for evaluating papers’ quality. In the most recent qualitative evaluation of keywords, those keywords provided in the articles of Iranian dental journals, published in English language and indexed in PubMed has been compared with preferred terms in MeSH. Findings of the study showed that about 30% of the keywords have not completely conformed to these terms, due to writing errors observed in them.[2] Therefore, identifying prevalent errors in writing keywords by the authors provides the ground for the increase of presence of those keywords conforming to the preferred MeSH terms; and consequently, quality of keywords will be improved.