Development of a procedure for assigning keywords for indexing scientific literature in speech therapy

Abstract

Speech therapy literature is generally available in databases or in journals. However, referencing (recording articles in databases) and indexing (assigning keywords) articles has never been specifically studied. This paper introduces to a procedure to give keywords to speech therapy scientific documents (dissertations, articles, books ...), based on the analysis of a specialised corpus.

The method explored the conceptions of speech therapists in order to establish a ranking of keywords based on an existing corpus. We standardized about 4,000 keywords given by the authors to their articles published in the journal Rééducation Orthophonique between 1997 and 2014. The creation of three facets for the key words enabled the development of an indexing diagramme aimed at users and authors of scientific literature in speech therapy, along with a user guide providing keyword allocation instructions and writing rules.

We hope to bring awareness to speech therapists about the problem of referencing and to contribute to the harmonization of the indexing practices of scientific literature in speech therapy. By basing grey literature on the same principles and offering the same tools as published literature, speech therapy would acquire more easily identifiable knowledge resources.