Previous research shows that keyphrases are useful tools in document retrieval and navigation. While these point to a relation between keyphrases and document retrieval performance, no other work uses this relationship to identify keyphrases of a given document. This work aims to establish a link between the problems of query performance prediction (QPP) and keyphrase extraction. To this end, features used in QPP are evaluated in keyphrase extraction using a naïve Bayes classifier. Our experiments indicate that these features improve the effectiveness of keyphrase extraction in documents of different length. More importantly, commonly used features of frequency and first position in text perform poorly on shorter documents, whereas QPP features are more robust and achieve better results. © 2012 The Author(s).