Research Article Titles and Disciplinary Conventions: A Corpus Study of Eight Disciplines

Abstract

Research articles are clearly influenced by the discipline of the research being reported. Just as disciplinary conventions place constraints on, for example, the moves and language use of abstracts and introductions, they also provide a set of options for title design. This study attempts to identify the title conventions of eight disciplines by focusing on various features that play a part in title design: the use of multiple-unit titles (those with subtitles); the use of noun phrases to form the title; and 'a' or 'the' in initial position. The length of titles is investigated, as is the proportion of substantive words. Data is based on a 3,200-title corpus of titles from research articles published in prestigious journals in four disciplines in the hard sciences (botany, fluid engineering, geology, and medicine) and four in the soft sciences (economics, education, history, and sociology). The data is presented in a visual form that compares title features by discipline, to demonstrate title conventions and to help novice writers understand the features and options available.

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

“…Interestingly, we found that not only the authors follow one another in their title choices (Nagano, 2015) within disciplines but that certain trends emerged in a whole range of disciplines at the same time. This is worth further study.…”

“…For the first role, the words are chosen to "convey credible information for a given population of producer-readers" (Callon et al, 1983, p. 199). Thus, the choice of words is a negotiation process reflecting both the behavior of individual authors and scholarly collectives (Hyland, 2004(Hyland, , 2012Nagano, 2015). Authors choose particular words to denote their alliance with particular communities, sub-communities, and lines of thought.…”

“…Titles are co-constructed within the "conceptual frames" (Hyland, 2012) of disciplines (Nagano, 2015). The usage of the acceptable discourse is a sign that a novice author is being socialized into a discipline (Becher and Trowler, 2001).…”

“…We see that as early as dissertation work (Demarest and Sugimoto, 2015), where it was possible to discern among three disciplines (physics, psychology, and philosophy) based on a limited set of terms they used. Nagano (2015) claimed that the choices made in title construction are "largely matter of custom, habit, and copying others" (p. 134). The great influence of individual disciplines was supported by a number of studies that found greater differences in title characteristics between rather than within disciplines (van Wesel et al, 2014).…”

Structural Organisation of Research Article Titles: A Comparative Study of Titles of Business, Gynaecology and Law

“…In view of this, titles have been studied from varied perspectives, in terms of title length (e.g., Afful, 2017;Hudson, 2016), the effects of title form and length on the rate of citation (e.g., Fox & Burns, 2015;Jamali & Nikzad, 2011;Whissell, 2013), syntactic organisation (e.g., Afful, 2017;Cheng et al, 2012), diachronic lens (e.g., Rahman & Hussein, 2016) or informativity/semantic content (e.g., Afful, 2017;Rahman & Hussein, 2016). There are other studies which have focused on a single discipline (e.g., Cheng et al, 2012;Wang & Bai, 2007;Whissell, 1999) or multidiscipline (e.g., Fortanet et al, 1997;Haggan, 2004;Nagano, 2015). Although literature shows that titles have been studied from macro or microstructure levels in individual disciplines (e.g., Cheng et al, 2012) and cross-disciplinary perspectives (e.g., Fortanet et al, 1997;Haggan, 2004), detailed investigation of RA title syntactic structures appears inadequate.…”