In writing a research proposal, it is necessary to determine ‘keywords’ which indicate its content since keywords capture the essence of research ‘in a nutshell’. This is to help the readers who want to locate our research proposal through searching indexes, directories, and catalogs. The keywords usually consist of 3 to 6 terms, presented in a bulleted list or series of words separated by commas, that pinpoint the core ideas behind the research.
Keywords do not have to be an individual word, but they can be in a form of phrases consisting of two or more words. For example, keywords can be: ‘foreign language anxiety’, ‘content writing’, ‘gender representation’, etc; where individual word search will give us different results. We can think of keywords we would like to recommend to someone if they want to conduct an online search to find our research.
Another thing to remember about keywords is that they might contain some terms written on the title. This is not a big problem because keywords and title should also correlate with each other to describe the research content. However, try to also include keywords that do not occur on our research title but are still relevant. Take an example, a research title might be:
The perceived risks of online banking: A survey of online shopping behavior and bank customers’ feelings about security and fraud in relation to their use of internet banking
The keywords might include some of the following terms:
online shopping, internet banking, shopping behavior, customer satisfaction, banking security, internet fraud