A public database of academic research area names?

Question

I am working on a website for academic researchers. When a user registers to the website he/she enters keywords related to the research fields he/she is working on. Since every user create their own keywords the database is populated by many duplicate keywords. This makes it very hard to query users according to their areas of interest. For example a user enters CGI and another enters Computer-generated imagery and they both mean the same thing.

Instead of letting users create keywords for their research fields, I want the users to select their fields of interest from a fixed list of keywords. Is there a public database of such keywords that I can use?

Answer 1

It looks like you need to do some user research first - find out what your users actually need, rather than finding an arbitary list - work out a taxonomy for your site before you think about coding the site. There's no shrotcut to good UX design :)