The Length and Semantic Structure of Article Titles—Evolving Disciplinary Practices and Correlations with Impact

In this paper we examine the characteristics of titles (average length, proportion of titles with subtitles, proportion of interrogatory and indicative titles) and how they changed over a substantial period of time (half a century). We consistently analyze core literature in five diverse fields, in order to probe the usage of titles as a disciplinary identity building tool. In addition, we study whether different types of titles are used differently by authors depending on their academic age and productivity and collaboration levels, which has not been studied before. Finally, we revisit the connection between title characteristics and impact. We found that belonging to some discipline is the strongest determinant for the length of the titles and the occurrence of different forms of titles. This suggests that authors try to comply with the norms set in their fields. However, these norms are not fixed in time. Over the decades, the practices have changed, some of them quite abruptly. Individual groups of authors most often did not differ in their practices regarding the use of titles. We find that using titles posed as questions or titles stating the result results in no citation benefit.

[1]  John Hudson,et al.  An analysis of the titles of papers submitted to the UK REF in 2014: authors, disciplines, and stylistic details , 2016, Scientometrics.

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

[3]  Stasa Milojevic,et al.  Accuracy of simple, initials-based methods for author name disambiguation , 2013, J. Informetrics.

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

[6]  Arden White.  A further exploration of title size and author number , 1991, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[7]  Rie Koizumi,et al.  Relationships between text length and lexical diversity measures: Can we use short texts of less than 100 tokens? , 2012 .

[8]  Scott Jarvis,et al.  vocd: A theoretical and empirical evaluation , 2007 .

[9]  C. Bazerman.  Physicists Reading Physics , 1985 .

[10]  Tony Becher,et al.  Academic Tribes and Territories Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines SECOND EDITION , 2001 .

[11]  J. Berson.  Memory Practices in the Sciences (review) , 2009 .

[12]  Sedghi Hamed,et al.  MEASURING VOCABULARY DIVERSITY OF PROPERTY IN STYLE , 2013 .

[13]  D. Altman,et al.  Do declarative titles affect readers’ perceptions of research findings? A randomized trial , 2016, Research Integrity and Peer Review.

[14]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research , 2016, Scientometrics.

[15]  David Malvern,et al.  Measuring vocabulary diversity using dedicated software , 2000 .

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

[17]  B. Latour,et al.  Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts , 1979 .

[18]  Trine Dahl,et al.  Traces of self and others in research articles. A comparative pilot study of English, French and Norwegian research articles in medicine, economics and linguistics , 2002 .

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

[20]  Stasa Milojevic,et al.  Quantifying the cognitive extent of science , 2015, J. Informetrics.

[21]  Eldad Yechiam,et al.  Amusing titles in scientific journals and article citation , 2008, J. Inf. Sci..

[22]  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.

[23]  Sally Wyatt,et al.  What a difference a colon makes: how superficial factors influence subsequent citation , 2013, Scientometrics.

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

[25]  G. Garzone,et al.  Disciplinary Identities. Individuality and Community in Academic Discourse , 2014 .

[26]  Jeffrey Aronson,et al.  WHEN I USE A WORD.. , 1996 .

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

[28]  Giovanni Abramo,et al.  The effect of a country’s name in the title of a publication on its visibility and citability , 2016, Scientometrics.

[29]  Tomaz Bartol,et al.  Nano language and distribution of article title terms according to power laws , 2015, Scientometrics.

[30]  M. Callon,et al.  From translations to problematic networks: An introduction to co-word analysis , 1983 .

[31]  Lev Vygotsky.  Mind in society , 1978 .

[32]  Cassidy R. Sugimoto,et al.  Argue, observe, assess: Measuring disciplinary identities and differences through socio‐epistemic discourse , 2015, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

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

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

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

[36]  Anthony F. J. van Raan,et al.  Non-alphanumeric characters in titles of scientific publications: An analysis of their occurrence and correlation with citation impact , 2011, J. Informetrics.

[37]  Rafael Ball,et al.  Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005 , 2009, Scientometrics.

[38]  Trine Dahl,et al.  Textual metadiscourse in research articles: a marker of national culture or of academic discipline? , 2004 .

[39]  Blaise Cronin,et al.  Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing , 2002, J. Documentation.

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

[41]  Stasa Milojevic,et al.  How Are Academic Age, Productivity and Collaboration Related to Citing Behavior of Researchers? , 2012, PloS one.

[42]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Which factors help authors produce the highest impact research? Collaboration, journal and document properties , 2013, J. Informetrics.

[43]  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.

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

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

[46]  James M. Cook,et al.  Do scholars follow Betteridge’s Law? The use of questions in journal article titles , 2016, Scientometrics.