Doctoral students at NYU are able to make their scholarship publicly available by depositing in NYU's institutional repository, known as the Faculty Digital Archive. For more information about publishing open access, see the NYU Research Guide regarding Open Access.
To maximize the impact of making your scholarship openly available, it is important to consider the "discoverability" of the work, or how other scholars and researchers will be able to find your materials. Discoverability can be enhanced if the record for the work includes descriptive subject headings from a standardized thesaurus that is commonly used in your field.
In the health sciences, common subject thesauri include:
In order to effectively select descriptive subjects terms, it is necessary to identify the core concepts that are represented within the work. This process may include critically re-reading the paper's title, abstract, section titles, the table of contents, or introduction or conclusion. Additionally, if there are related works that are substantially similar in topic, it could be worthwhile to see what subjects have been assigned to those records.
It may also be helpful to return to any literature searches that were conducted in the process of completing the work; the subject headings that were used to locate relevant literature may do a good job of capturing the subject that are discussed in the final manuscript.
The CINAHL Subject Thesaurus can be explored by accessing CINAHL via NYU's gateway, and then navigating to 'CINAHL Subject Headings' in the top navigation bar. Also see CINAHL Subject Headings - FAQs
The MeSH Thesaurus can be explored via the National Library of Medicine (NLM) MeSH browser. Also see the MeSH Homepage
The APA Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms can be accessed via PsycNET. Also see the APA Thesaurus Homepage.