Understanding the keyword adoption behavior patterns of researchers from a functional structure perspective

Researchers adopt keywords to signify the core content of papers, and the spatial distribution of these keywords within the paper can provide insight into researchers’ adoption behavior patterns. In this study, the primary purpose was to investigate how keyword adoption patterns affect academic papers’ perceived value. First, we collected 5,739 papers from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) to extract the first-level subtitles for statistically characterizing the functional structure of papers in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field. Second, we introduce a balance degree indicator to measure the keywords’ spatial distribution. Next, we identify researchers’ keyword adoption behavior patterns based on the keyword spatial distribution in the functional structure. Finally, we investigate the effect of keyword adoption behavior patterns on paper impact. The findings of our study reveal that: (1) In the Library and Information Science field, the balance degree values exhibit a normal distribution and are verified to be valid. (2) Depending on the keyword distribution across the four segments, the keyword adoption behaviors of researchers can be categorized into 24 distinct types. (3) The balance degree is positively correlated with both the citation and download count, and notably, the keyword spatial distribution of the Introduction and Results & Discussion sections have a significant effect on a paper’s impact. These findings have significant implications for keyword selection and the early prediction of a paper’s citation and download frequency.