BACKGROUND: As the importance of keywords useful for indexing increases with the development of evidence based medicine, the importance of the English keywords also increases with the commencement of Koreamed. Though the information of authors recommends using MeSH terms for keywords, many authors do not stick to this principle. The objectives of this study are to investigate how much of the English keywords of the Journal of Korean Academy of Family Medicine(JKAFM) are used with precise MeSH terms and how weR the keywords stand for the articles. METHODS: The English keywords were analyzed from the 455 articles of JKAFM published from Jan. 1992 to Dec. 1997. The authors investigated the frequently used keywords and what percentage of the keywords coincide with MeSH using MeSH browser. And for the ten randomly chosen articles from each of the six volumes, we examined what percentage of the English keywords coincide with the MeSH terms which had consensus of two family physicians and evaluated the validity. RESULTS: The total number of the English keywords used was 897, and 23 kinds of keywords including depression were used 5 or more times. The number of terms precisely coincident with MeSH was 161(17.9%), the number of terms with trivial difference(order or singular/pleural) was 34(3.8%), and 702 terms(78.2%) were not MeSH terms. Among the 202 MeSH terms determined with consensus from the randomly chosen 60 English abstracts, 51 terms(25.2%) were precisely coincident, 38 terms(18.8%) showed trivial difference, and 113 terms(55.9%) were not used. CONCLUSIONS: Many of the English keywords of JKAFM does not coincide with MeSH, and over half of the keywords does not validly stand for the contents of the articles.