Keywords In and Out of Context

is the subtitle of Brian O’Connor’s 1996 book Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, which I wish I had read earlier in my doctoral studies, though it had a great impact on me when I did encounter it later (since much of my career had involved indexing and abstracting for various publishers).

In any event, he notes (page 8) Samuel Johnson’s definition of “abstract” as “a smaller quantity containing the virtue and power of a greater” (and, presumably, “pointing” to that greater document). O’Connor comments that the “virtue” and “power” in these may well be different for different people (page 8), which I think offers an intriguing precedent to our more contemporary information retrieval terms of “relevance” and “pertinence.”

In that vein, “keywords” are also more compact versions of this idea, especially as they often accompany abstracts in today’s online journals and have largely replaced more traditional journal indices. And, of course, we can trace, as O’Connor does, “pointing” itself to a point long before journals or Johnson.