摘要:It is important in online bibliographic information retrieval that key words that accurately describe the content of the article are assigned. A survey of assignment of key words in foreign journals, Japanese journals published in European languages and Japanese journals held by the Medical Library of Nagasaki University was conducted. About 30% of the journals assign key words to each article, among which only 15% adopted MeSH as key words. It was also found from the survey on the starting year of assigning key words to articles in the journal that the role of key words has been transfered from assisting researchers to facilitating indexing at the time of preparation of online data bases. The author believes that all journals should adopt a system to assign key words (especially MeSH) so that indexers may index the articles easily.