Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005

Ball, Rafael

doi:10.1007/s11192-007-1984-5

Cited by 55 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…While Lewison and Hartley (2005) found that the nationality of authors did not affect title characteristics, Ball (2009) found national and regional differences in the use of question marks in article titles over a 40-year period he studied. These discrepancies might be described by the different disciplines studied, because researchers have found, analyzing the full text of articles, that disciplinary identity in medicine transcends national differences, while in ECN and linguistics the national writing tradition is more visible (Breivega et al, 2002;Dahl, 2004).…”

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confidence: 93%

“…In many scientific fields the principal type of scientific document is a research article ("paper"). Titles and the choice of words in them play two important roles: they inform the reader about the content of the paper, while at the same time attempting to trigger their attention (Bazerman, 1985(Bazerman, , 1988Ball, 2009). 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).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Thus, these studies take a normative stance, trying to assist researchers in choosing title characteristics that have been found to lead to more citations. These studies range in the size of the corpus they use: from 50 articles (Jacques and Sebire, 2010) to nearly 20 million articles (Ball, 2009). The following title characteristics have been most studied: length, presence of non-alphanumeric characters, syntax/type, and word analysis.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Hudson (2016) found that the titles that include question marks were longer than other titles. The increase in the usage of questions in titles has been attributed to marketing purposes (Ball, 2009). The study of over 2,000 articles published in 6 PLoS journals found that articles with question titles were more often downloaded, but less frequently cited (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011).…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Milojević

2017

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.

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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 do not lead to citation benefit.

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confidence: 93%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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

Milojević

2017

Front. Res. Metr. Anal.

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“…The former discuss titles in education, psychology and literary criticism (Dillon, 1982); in literature, linguistics and science (Haggan, 2004), in natural, medical and social sciences (Buxton and Meadow, 1977;Jaime Sisò, 2009;Pereira, Fadigas, Senna and Moret, 2011); in anthropology, biology, biochemistry, medicine, linguistics, psychology (Soler, 2007(Soler, & 2011; in medicine, life sciences and physics (Ball, 2009); in medicine and linguistics (Busch-Lauer, 2000); in biology, clinical medicine, oncology, chemistry, engineering and physics (Hartley, 2005(Hartley, & 2007Lewison and Hartley, 2005).…”

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confidence: 99%

Titles in Veterinary Medicine research articles

Cianflone

2013

Círculo De Lingüística Aplicada a La Comunicación

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Titles are the first point of contact between authors and readers. They call for attention and provide concise and exhaustive information on the research. State of the art in the medical field shows that titles have a mean word count ranging from 15.48 to 15.85 and that they can be arranged into four different formats: nominal, full-sentence, compound and question. Veterinary Medicine has not been object of study and is an underrepresented field in genre analytical surveys. This research wants to fill in part this gap by discussing a pilot survey on veterinary research article titles. To this aim, six issues from three veterinary journals were scanned and the samples labelled "original research article" were examined. The corpus, consisting of 74 specimens, was analysed to elicit the mean word count and the format. Results reveal a mean length of 14.06 words per title and the prevalence of nominal and compound titles. These data are shared to offer a preliminary framework that can serve to inform on the practices adopted by veterinary researchers to communicate findings.

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The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal

Fox

Burns

2015

Ecology and Evolution

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A poorly chosen article title may make a paper difficult to discover or discourage readership when discovered, reducing an article's impact. Yet, it is unclear how the structure of a manuscript's title influences readership and impact. We used manuscript tracking data for all manuscripts submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from 2004 to 2013 and citation data for papers published in this journal from 1987 to 2011 to examine how title features changed and whether a manuscript's title structure was predictive of success during the manuscript review process and/or impact (citation) after publication. Titles of manuscripts submitted to Functional Ecology became marginally longer (after controlling for other variables), broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study. Papers with subtitles were less likely to be rejected by editors both pre- and post-peer review, although both effects were small and the presence of subtitles in published papers was not predictive of citations. Papers with specific names of study organisms in their titles fared poorly during editorial (but not peer) review and, if published, were less well cited than papers whose titles did not include specific names. Papers with intermediate length titles were more successful during editorial review, although the effect was small and title word count was not predictive of citations. No features of titles were predictive of reviewer willingness to review papers or the length of time a paper was in peer review. We conclude that titles have changed in structure over time, but features of title structure have only small or no relationship with success during editorial review and post-publication impact. The title feature that was most predictive of manuscript success: papers whose titles emphasize broader conceptual or comparative issues fare better both pre- and post-publication than do papers with organism-specific titles.

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Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005

Cited by 55 publications

References 30 publications

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

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

Titles in Veterinary Medicine research articles

The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal

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