Tags, Hashtags, Keywords, and Categories

If you click around my site you will notice that many of the articles, presentations, and projects are “tagged”. These tags are also listed on the right side of the site to help people navigate quickly to all of the entries that relate to a particular topic. Tags are common in blogs, wikis, and other websites. Hashtags play a similar role on Twitter (e.g., I use #p544 to identify tweets related to p544, a class that I teach). These tags all serve a similar role to the keywords that are often presented in an academic journal or conference submission website–they help to quickly and easily identify the broad categories that a work relates to.

Of course, each system has it’s quirks (some academic organizations, for example, have standardized sets of keywords to help keep things clear). However, tags play two incredibly valuable roles: 1) they help the author quickly identify their work, and 2) they help the reader or searcher, quickly find work that is related to an area of interest.

My recommendation, therefore, is that you attend to these! Furthermore, if you can come up with your own tags and categories to organize your materials, it will be incredibly helpful down the road. Having keywords in your reference manager, notebooks, and filing cabinets can be the difference between spending 2 minutes to find a few key articles, or spending hours looking for that one paper you are sure you read 5 years ago. In all of your writing, if you have an idea of what the big categories are that it will be linked to, it will help you shape your argument, experiment, ideas, etc. even if those aren’t the exact tags or keywords that you use in the end. The goal here is to use the concept of a tag, in any form, to organize and position your work effectively.