I am creating a simple database that will hold information about various publications. There are keywords that are associated with these publications and there can be anywhere from 1 to about 6 of these different keywords.
As I see it I have two choices:
1) create keyword fields 1-6 in the publications database and accept that some of these fields will be empty.
2) create two tables: "publication" and "keyword". In this scenario I have no limit on the amount of keywords that are used and I don't have empty fields. However, many of the keywords repeat for different publications. In this situation I would have some repeating words in the columns.
I lean toward #2 but wanted to see if there was a preferred standard or another possibility that I am overlooking??
Thanks
Jodi
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Jodi L Kanter
BioInformatics Database Administrator
University of Virginia
(434) 924-2846
jkanter@virginia.edu
