Author keywords for scientific literature are terms selected and created by authors. Although most studies have focused on how to apply author keywords to represent their research interests, little is known about the process of how authors select keywords. To fill this research gap, this study presents a pilot study on author keyword selection behavior. Our empirical results show that the average percentages of author keywords appearing in titles, abstracts, and both titles and abstracts are 31%, 52.1%, and 56.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, we find that keywords also appear in references and high-frequency keywords. The proportions of author-selected keywords appearing in the references and high-frequency keywords are 41.6% and 56.1%, respectively. In addition, keywords of papers written by core authors (productive authors) are found to appear less frequently in titles and abstracts in their papers than that of others, and appear more frequently in references and high-frequency keywords. The percentages of keywords appearing in titles and abstracts in scientific papers are negatively correlated with citation counts of papers. In contrast, the percentages of author keywords appearing in high-frequency keywords are positively associated with citation counts of papers.

科学文献的作者关键字是作者选择和创建的术语。尽管大多数研究都集中在如何应用作者关键字来表示他们的研究兴趣，但是对于作者如何选择关键字的过程知之甚少。为了填补这一研究空白，本研究提出了关于作者关键词选择行为的初步研究。我们的经验结果表明，出现在标题，摘要以及标题和摘要中的作者关键词的平均百分比分别为31％，52.1％和56.7％。同时，我们发现关键字也出现在参考文献和高频关键字中。在参考文献中出现的作者选择关键词和在高频关键词中出现的比例分别为41.6％和56.1％。此外，发现核心作者（生产作者）撰写的论文的关键词在其论文的标题和摘要中的出现频率低于其他论文，在参考文献和高频关键词中的出现频率更高。科技论文的标题和摘要中出现的关键词百分比与论文的引文计数负相关。相比之下，出现在高频关键字中的作者关键字的百分比与论文的引用次数呈正相关。