Abstract
Editor, T hank you for the thoughtful editorial on ‘The ingredients of a good paper’ in the September issue of Acta Ophthalmologica (Stefansson & Kivela 2010). I particularly appreciate your words on choosing text for titles and abstracts. These sections of the article are incorporated verbatim into the Medline record and provide key access points for those searching Medline. However, I believe it is important to clarify the role of author-selected keywords in Medline indexing. The National Library of Medicine maintains a website with information on the indexing process. The page at http:// www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/disted/mesh/pro cess.html discusses the use of author keywords by the indexers as a guide to what concepts may be discussed in the article itself, but as the subsequent pages make clear, the indexer uses only terms found in MeSH, a controlled vocabulary or taxonomy, in selecting the subject indexing terms that appear in the Medline record. For instance, the recent article, ‘Ocular blood flow and oxygen delivery to the retina in primary open-angle glaucoma patients: the addition of dorzolamide to timolol monotherapy’ Siesky et al. (2010), has the following keywords in the text:
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