The evolution of research article titles: the case of Journal of Pragmatics 1978–2018

Previous studies seldom investigated the evolution of research article titles in pragmatics. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of 650 research article titles, this study depicts the evolutionary trends of research article titles published in the Journal of Pragmatics regarding their length, lexical density, structural constructions and semantic content since the establishment of the journal in 1977. Our findings identified a trend towards longer titles with higher lexical density, an increasing preference for compound constructions over nominal-group and full sentence constructions, and a more prevalent presentation of information about research method/design in addition to the topic in titles over the past four decades. These findings suggest that research article titles published in the journal appear to be diachronically more informative.

[1]  T. Jacques,et al.  The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals , 2010, JRSM short reports.

[2]  James Hartley,et al.  What's in a title? Numbers of words and the presence of colons , 2005, Scientometrics.

[3]  Isaac N. Mwinlaaru,et al.  COMMONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY IN ACADEMIC WRITING: AN ANALYSIS OF CONFERENCE PAPER TITLES OF FOUR SCHOLARS , 2010 .

[4]  Charles W Fox,et al.  The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal , 2015, Ecology and evolution.

[5]  Bhaskar Mukherjee,et al.  Short and amusing: The relationship between title characteristics, downloads, and citations in psychology articles , 2014, J. Inf. Sci..

[6]  Diane Belcher,et al.  Academic writing for graduate students: A course for nonnative speakers of English. 253pp. Academic writing for graduate students: Commentary John M. Swales & Christine B. Feak. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, 117 pp , 1995 .

[7]  Ahmad Alibabaee,et al.  Syntactic Structures in Research Article Titles from Three Different Disciplines: Applied Linguistics, Civil Engineering, and Dentistry , 2015 .

[8]  L. Zhang.  Reflections on the pedagogical imports of western practices for professionalizing ESL/EFL writing and writing-teacher education , 2016 .

[9]  C. Berkenkotter,et al.  Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/culture/power , 1994 .

[10]  Michael Gibbert,et al.  What makes a ‘good’ title and (how) does it matter for citations? A review and general model of article title attributes in management science , 2016, Scientometrics.

[11]  V. Soler.  Writing Titles in Science: An Exploratory Study. , 2007 .

[12]  C. Paiva,et al.  Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often , 2012, Clinics.

[13]  Mohammad Hajizadeh,et al.  The effect of characteristics of title on citation rates of articles , 2013, Scientometrics.

[14]  Rahman Sahragard,et al.  A diachronic study on the information provided by the research titles of applied linguistics journals , 2016, Scientometrics.

[15]  R. G. Harris.  Book Review: How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper 3rd Ed , 1991 .

[16]  Yan Wang,et al.  A Corpus-Based Syntactic Study of Medical Research Article Titles. , 2007 .

[17]  R. Nagano,et al.  Conventions: A Corpus Study of Eight Disciplines , 2015 .

[18]  M. HamidR.Jamali,et al.  Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations , 2011, Scientometrics.

[19]  Moshe Yitzhaki,et al.  Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article , 2002, Scientometrics.

[20]  Yu Chen,et al.  The evolution of conceptual diversity in economics titles from 1890 to 2012 , 2014, Scientometrics.

[21]  Kate E Decleene,et al.  Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 2011 .

[22]  Richard A. Goodman,et al.  What's in a Title? A Descriptive Study of Article Titles in Peer-Reviewed Medical Journals , 2001 .

[23]  John M. Swales,et al.  Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings , 1993 .

[24]  Alireza Jalilifar,et al.  Writing titles in applied linguistics: A comparative study of theses and research articles , 2010 .

[25]  Viviana Soler,et al.  Comparative and contrastive observations on scientific titles written in English and Spanish , 2011 .

[26]  Moshe Yitzhaki,et al.  Relation of title length of journal articles to number of authors , 1994, Scientometrics.

[27]  María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza,et al.  Titles are " serious stuff " 1 : a historical study of academic titles , 2013 .

[28]  J. Hartley.  Planning that title: Practices and preferences for titles with colons in academic articles , 2007 .

[29]  M. Haggan.  Research paper titles in literature, linguistics and science: dimensions of attraction , 2004 .

[30]  Chao Ma,et al.  Succinct effect or informative effect: the relationship between title length and the number of citations , 2018, Scientometrics.

[31]  Robert A. Day.  How to write and publish a scientific paper , 1979 .

[32]  David I. Méndez,et al.  Titles in English-medium Astrophysics research articles , 2014, Scientometrics.

[33]  Andrew Moore Editor-in-Chief.  What's in a title? A two-step approach to optimisation for man and machine , 2010 .

[34]  F. Habibzadeh,et al.  Are shorter article titles more attractive for citations? Cross-sectional study of 22 scientific journals. , 2010, Croatian medical journal.

[35]  Mohammad Zohrabi,et al.  Process-oriented Listening Instruction: A study of Iranian EFL Teachers’ Stated and Actual Practices , 2017 .

[37]  Klaus Wohlrabe,et al.  Title characteristics and citations in economics , 2016, Scientometrics.