SRELS Journal of Information Management

This study is based on 5,112 author-assigned ‘Associated keywords’ culled out from 1,238 research papers selected from eleven different journals of physics published by American Institute of Physics. The research papers from each issue have been chosen by the method of random sampling. All these keywords have been formed from 10,156 single words and/or keywords through 6,718 contextual relationships. The keywords assigned by the respective authors of the concerned articles have only been taken for study, but no keyword was collected from anywhere of any article by either of the Authors of this paper in order to avoid biasness. It has been mathematically established that the formation of ‘Associated keywords’ from single words and/or keywords depends on contextual relationships exist among different single words and/or keywords. The name given to contextual relationship is ‘Alliance potential’, and a new parameter has been defined to measure the rate of keyword formation per unit ‘Alliance potential’. The name given to this new parameter is ‘Associated keyword formation coefficient’ or AKFC. This parameter remains constant for a particular journal and varies over different journals. The constancy of AKFC for ten physics journals has been verified and this has been manifested as a characteristic feature of a journal belonging to a specific subject domain.