Afsaneh Shokri - English Department, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran
Reza Khany - English Department, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran
Mohammad Aliakbari - English Department, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran

Keywords accompanying abstracts are the metadata and topic representative features of research articles. They can enhance the retrieval, citation, and sorting of the studies in academia. Whereas keywords have been of interest to researchers in various fields of study, few, if any, studies have addressed them in a corpus-driven analysis. The present diachronic case study, then, aimed at analyzing ۲۴۵ corpus-based studies to investigate their form, relevance, source, and frequency. Selected studies were published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics from ۱۹۹۶ to ۲۰۱۶. Descriptive analysis of the data revealed that domain-specific keywords were the most frequent ones supporting the journal’s more specific taste. High percentage of keywords with one representation across the two decades alerted the chaos in selecting appropriate keywords. Lack of criteria in selecting the most relevant keywords and asymmetrical forms were among the salient results. Findings may be useful to the researchers, authors of research articles, as well as editors and publishers.

Corpus-Based Studies, Keyword Indexing, Research Articles Keywords, Domain-Specific Keywords