English Research Article Titles: Cultural and Disciplinary Perspectives

Abstract

This article investigated the English research article (RA) titles across different disciplines and cultures. To this end, 600 RA titles in the Chinese context and 600 RA titles in the international context were collected from six disciplines, which are grouped as social and natural sciences. The frequency of title types, their subtypes, and title length are calculated in terms of cultural and disciplinary factors. The result showed a significant difference in title types and subtypes along two dimensions. It suggested that Chinese culture and language and the discourse practice of academic publication are responsible for the salient features of English titles by Chinese scholars. The suggestion for further study is to collect more titles from other disciplines and cultural contexts to verify the results.

Structural Patterns of Research Article Titles: An Exploratory Study in Five Branches of Linguistics

“…In terms of syntactic structures, nominal group titles (those having nouns as head words) were found to be more prevalent in the hard sciences (Méndez et al, 2014;Wang & Bai, 2007) and in both the hard and soft sciences (Soler, 2007). Also, more single titles (those consisting of one construction ending with one or no punctuation marks) were observed in the hard sciences, while compound titles (those comprised of two parts separated by a punctuation mark such as a colon or question mark) were more frequent in the soft sciences (Busch-Lauer, 2000;Hyland & Zou, 2022;Jiang & Hyland, 2023;Nagano, 2015;Xie, 2020). In linguistics, different findings were reported on the prevalence of compound titles compared to single constructions.…”

“…The research has examined titles in a variety of works, including textbooks, review papers, research articles, proceedings papers, theses, and dissertations. More recent studies (e.g., Hyland & Zou, 2022;Jiang & Hyland, 2023;Pearson, 2020;Xiang & Li, 2020;Xie, 2020) have concentrated on the titles of research articles themselves, indicating a growing interest in this area.…”

“…Numerous authors have suggested that title length varies significantly across disciplines (Milojević, 2017;Nagano, 2015;Soler, 2007). Although some authors have found that titles in the sciences were longer than those in the social sciences (Nagano, 2015) and linguistics (Busch-Lauer, 2000;Haggan, 2004;Soler, 2007;Xie, 2020), others, such as Hyland and Zou (2022), reported opposite findings and argued that titles in social sciences and humanities, which included linguistics in their categorization, were longer than those in the sciences. Jiang and Hyland (2023) concluded that the length between 11 and 15 words was the most common for recent titles found in both soft and hard sciences due to the similar need to make the title more descriptive to attract readers' attention.…”

“…Considering the wide range of findings on titles in the field of linguistics and the various approaches used to present research data, novice researchers may find it difficult to apply them effectively as guidelines. For example, some frameworks have presented data that may have been intended for a different purpose and not as guidelines, such as total word counts of all titles in the corpus (e.g., Gesuato, 2008;Haggan, 2004;Soler, 2007;Xiang & Li, 2020;Xie, 2020). Also, mean values of title length have been presented in most studies, but a more extensive presentation of the range of possibly preferred title lengths would be more illuminating.…”

A Generative Adversarial Networks Based Approach for Literary Translation

“…Among them, language structure is transformed at the language level such as language structure and word usage habits, that is, the adaptive selection transformation of language dimension. After the intelligent translators of literature in colleges and universities have enough understanding of the expression habits of the original author, they can choose the appropriate language form to ensure that the intelligent translation of literature conforms to the original language ecological environment [16,17]. It should be noted that literary intelligent translation should avoid word for word and sentence by sentence translation, and no longer simply pursue the neat language form, but combine the ecosystem of the target language and the original language to strengthen the ecological balance between the original text and the translation in the intelligent translation of literature in colleges and universities, so as to provide a better translation environment for translators.…”