Some indexes use "keywords" as an index approach. The indexers take words that are actually used in the item they are indexing rather than assigning a heading that may not be used in the item itself. This is sometimes called “natural language” indexing.
For example, for an article called, "Is the death penalty effective?", a keyword approach might use "death penalty" as a key phrase. An article on the same topic called, "Capital punishment - right or wrong?" would get the key phrase "capital punishment" since that phrase is actually used in the title.
Titles may be very descriptive of the content of articles. Key word indexing based on the actual titles uses the author's own words rather than relying on an intermediary to interpret the article. However, when the words in the title are NOT descriptive -- for example, an article on Longfellow called "Meter in search of meaning" -- then keyword indexing is not helpful at all.
One other serious disadvantage of keyword indexing is that like items may not be together in the index because their titles do not contain the same words.
When keyword indexes are used in the right circumstances they can be very effective. You don't always look things up by subject. You may be looking for the name of an association, for example. If you were looking for the Association of American Aardvark Aficionados, it would really help to have a keyword approach to Aardvark in case you don't know the full, correct name of the group.
Quotation dictionaries almost always use a keyword approach. That lets you look up the quotation by the words that are actually used in it.
A typical entry in a keyword index might look like this:
BOOK
This is actually indexing three quotes. The first is "By reading one book", the second, "go little book" and so on.
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