Frequency of occurrence of keywords in journal articles of biological sciences

Keywords are commonly used to describe the main concepts of a journal article. Hence, do they follow a statistical distribution in terms of frequency of occurrence in the article? This work sets out to elucidate if frequency of occurrence of keywords follows a statistical distribution as well as whether the authors draw on the statistical occurrence of the concept to propose keywords. Using an in-house MATLAB machine reading software, the frequency of occurrence of keywords in the main text of 30 journal articles was tabulated. Results reveal that at least one of the authors’ proposed keywords is of high frequency of occurrence. However, occurrence frequency of other keywords largely depends on the scholastic style of the author where there is a substantial number of articles with keywords of low frequency of occurrence. These are likely important concepts of low frequency of occurrence.