Titles in research articles: Changes across time and discipline

Abstract

Titles are a crucial feature of research papers and have become increasingly important with changes in publishing practices and the explosion of published research. As a result, novice writers seeking to get their work noticed in international journals might benefit from a clear understanding of the features of research titles and an awareness of the relationship between language and disciplinary context. In this study, we explore this relationship and the impact of changing contexts on titles across the last 60 years on the length, form and content of 36,000 titles from the 10 leading journals from six disciplines spread along a soft‐hard science continuum. Our results show a considerable increase in the length of titles coupled with more interrogative and compound titles in almost all disciplines. There has also been a growing mention of methods in the titles of hard knowledge papers with more frequent inclusion of results in the softer domains. These diachronic changes can be attributed to different characteristics of the fields and of the changing dynamics of the publishing context. Our findings have important implications for early career academics seeking to publish in English and contribute to studies of diachronic analysis of academic discourse.

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.…”

“…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. Title lengths in linguistics varied from 7.98 (Soler, 2007) to 8.8 (Haggan, 2004), 9.08 (Busch-Lauer, 2000, 10.8 (Gesuato, 2008), 11.2 (Xiang & Li, 2020), 12.2 (Pearson, 2020), and 13.4 (Hyland & Zou, 2022 words per title, and titles seem to be increasing in length over time (Xiang & Li, 2020).…”

“…Within the field of linguistics, research has reported various findings in terms of title length and common patterns. Different findings among studies on the same discipline may not be surprising, though, since trends in research article titles have undergone a dramatic change over time (Jiang & Hyland, 2023;Xiang & Li, 2020). This, however, seems an inadequate explanation for previous research conclusions in linguistics title constructions, since the findings from the same time period exhibited divergent results.…”

Factors associating with or predicting more cited or higher quality journal articles: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…As mentioned above, the most general result for contemporary research is that in highly cited journals, shorter titles tend to be more cited, whereas for less cited journals, longer titles tend to be more cited (Sienkiewicz & Altmann, 2016). Nevertheless, there are exceptions and possibly disciplinary differences and changes over time (Jiang & Hyland, 2022). Also, the precise reason for the association can realistically only be speculated about and may be a second order effect of article type so cause‐and‐effect is unknown even when a relationship exists.…”