Titles in English-medium Astrophysics research articles

In this study we analyse a corpus of 300 randomly selected research paper titles written in English and published between 1998 and 2012 in the most prestigious journals in the field of Astrophysics, an under-researched discipline from a linguistic standpoint. We specifically address issues related to the evolution of titles, their length, their lexical density, their type distribution and their semantic content. Our findings reveal a trend towards relatively long titles with a high lexical density, a preference for nominal and simple titles over verbal and compound ones, a very low occurrence of question constructions, and a prevalence of purpose and results over methods as key research concepts expressed in titles. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies on titles in other scientific disciplines and provide explanations for the differences and similarities observed.

[1]  C. Duchet.  La Fille abandonnée et La Bête humaine, éléments de titrologie romanesque , 1973 .

[2]  B. Gee.  Early Physics and Astronomy: A Historical Introduction , 1975 .

[3]  A. J. Meadows,et al.  THE VARIATION IN THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF TITLES OF RESEARCH PAPERS WITH TIME AND DISCIPLINE , 1977 .

[4]  Elaine Tarone,et al.  ON THE USE OF THE PASSIVE IN TWO ASTROPHYSICS JOURNAL PAPERS , 1981 .

[5]  H.B. Michaelson,et al.  How to write and publish a scientific paper , 1981, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[6]  Jerry Suls,et al.  Social comparison in the social and physical sciences: An archival study. , 1983 .

[7]  Richard A. V. Diener,et al.  Informational dynamics of journal article titles , 1984, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[8]  K. A. McKibbon,et al.  Online access to medline in clinical settings , 2020 .

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

[10]  J. Rosner.  Reflections of science as a product , 1990, Nature.

[11]  Charles Bazerman,et al.  Persuasion at a Distance. (Book Reviews: Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science.) , 1990 .

[12]  K. A. McKibbon,et al.  Online access to MEDLINE in clinical settings. A study of use and usefulness. , 1990, Annals of internal medicine.

[13]  M. Huguier.  LA REDACTION MEDICALE , 1993 .

[14]  John M. Swales,et al.  Academic writing for graduate students : essential tasks and skills : a course for nonnative speakers of English , 1996 .

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

[16]  魏屹东,et al.  Scientometrics , 2018, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[17]  M. Killingsworth,et al.  Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/ Culture/Power , 1996 .

[18]  Inmaculada Fortanet Gómez,et al.  Linguistic analysis of research article titles: disciplinary variations , 1998 .

[19]  Elaine Tarone,et al.  On the use of the passive and active voice in astrophysics journal papers: With extensions to other languages and other fields , 1998 .

[20]  K. Hyland,et al.  PERSUASION AND CONTEXT: THE PRAGMATICS OF ACADEMIC METADISCOURSE , 1998 .

[21]  C. Whissell.  Linguistic Complexity of Abstracts and Titles in Highly Cited Journals , 1999 .

[22]  Edward J. Huth,et al.  Writing and Publishing in Medicine , 1999 .

[23]  Anna Trosborg,et al.  Analysing professional genres , 2000 .

[24]  N. Goodman.  Survey of active verbs in the titles of clinical trial reports. , 2000, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[25]  M. Roy.  Not wanted anywhere , 2000, BMJ : British Medical Journal.

[26]  Ines-A. Busch-Lauer.  Titles of English and German Research Papers in Medicine and Linguistics Theses and Research Articles , 2000 .

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

[28]  Laurence Anthony,et al.  Characteristic features of research article titles in computer science , 2001 .

[29]  Eija Ventola,et al.  The language of conferencing , 2002 .

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

[31]  P. Tugwell,et al.  Informative titles described article content , 2005 .

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

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

[34]  G. Walter,et al.  What's in a title? , 2006, The Medical journal of Australia.

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

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

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

[38]  Sara Gesuato,et al.  Encoding of Information in Titles: Academic Pratices across Four Genres in Linguistics , 2008 .

[39]  Christopher J. Taylor,et al.  Ecolingua. The Role of E-corpora in Translation and Language Learning , 2008 .

[40]  James Hartley,et al.  Academic Writing and Publishing: A Practical Handbook , 2008 .

[41]  M. Zigmond,et al.  COMPONENTS OF A RESEARCH ARTICLE , 2009 .

[42]  Titles or headlines?: anticipating conclusions in biomedical research article titles as a persuasive journalistic strategy to attract busy readers , 2009 .

[43]  M. Roy.  Du titre littéraire et de ses effets de lecture , 2009 .

[44]  Salvatore Mele,et al.  Citing and reading behaviours in high-energy physics , 2009, Scientometrics.

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

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

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

[48]  Chih-Hua Kuo,et al.  Research article titles in applied linguistics , 2012 .

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

[50]  Françoise Salager-Meyer,et al.  Análisis contrastivo de los títulos en los artículos de investigación de neurología redactados en español e inglés , 2013 .