Descriptores versus Palabras Clave sobre nutrición: aportación a la correcta indización

the correspondence between the keywords and the medical subject headings (decs) is essential to index the scientific article at the bibliographic data bases. the importance is higher when we are trying to recover documents. the aim of the study was to analyse the kw used in the articles of the nutritional reviews indexed at the scientific electronic library online (red scielo) and to determine its relation with decs. bibliometrical analyse of the kw in published articles between 2001 and 2007 at the reviews: anales venezolanos de nutrición, archivos latinoamericanos de nutrición, nutrición hospitalaria, revista chilena de nutrición y revista de nutri？ao. checking if the reviews have a correspondence with the medical subject headings (decs) of ops/bireme. descriptive analysis of the used pc was made, the analysis of the existence of linear trend between qualitative variables was performed with the x2 (？chi-square？ test). to compare the means between more than 2 groups for quantitative variables the analysis of variance (anova) was used with the bonferroni method. in the studied articles we can count 3093 different kw matching 988 (31,94%) with descriptors. kw have been used 6530 times being related in 3468 times (53,11%) with desc. this is due to the kw matched have been used the greatest number of times. the evolution of the appropriate pc during the analyzed years as well as the percentage of articles that contains all the kw matching with decs shows a slight positive tendency. only one third of the kw (31,94%) related to decs have been corrected. it is necessary to insist in the importance of the kw to access efficiently to the biomedical literature.