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What's in a title? Numbers of words and the presence of colons

Author

Listed:
  • Grant Lewison

    (Department of Information Science, City University)

  • James Hartley

    (Department of Psychology, Keele University)

Abstract

Summary Much has been written about titles in scientific journal articles but little research has been carried out. We aimed to assess in two studies how factors like the length of a title and its structure might vary in different scientific fields, and whether or not these features have changed over time. Statistical analyses were made of 216,500 UK papers from science journals, and of 133,200 international oncology papers. Factors examined included title length, the use of colons in the titles, and the number of authors. All of these factors increased over time for both sets of papers, although there were some disciplinary differences in the findings. In both studies, titles with colons occurred more frequently with single than with multiple authors except when the numbers of co-authors were large. Certain features of titles can be related to different disciplines, different journals, the numbers of authors and their nationalities.

Suggested Citation

  • Grant Lewison & James Hartley, 2005. "What's in a title? Numbers of words and the presence of colons," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 63(2), pages 341-356, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:63:y:2005:i:2:d:10.1007_s11192-005-0216-0
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-005-0216-0
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    Cited by:

    1. Lindsey E. Wylie & Katherine P. Hazen & Lori A. Hoetger & Joshua A. Haby & Eve M. Brank, 2018. "Four decades of the journal Law and Human Behavior: a content analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 655-693, May.
    2. Zhijun LI & Jinfen XU, 2019. "The evolution of research article titles: the case of Journal of Pragmatics 1978–2018," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1619-1634, December.
    3. Nick Haslam & Lauren Ban & Leah Kaufmann & Stephen Loughnan & Kim Peters & Jennifer Whelan & Sam Wilson, 2008. "What makes an article influential? Predicting impact in social and personality psychology," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 76(1), pages 169-185, July.
    4. Michal Jasienski, 2009. "Garfield’s demon and “surprising” or “unexpected” results in science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 78(2), pages 347-353, February.
    5. Hamid R. Jamali & Mahsa Nikzad, 2011. "Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(2), pages 653-661, August.
    6. James Hartley & Guillaume Cabanac, 2015. "An academic odyssey: writing over time," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(3), pages 1073-1082, June.
    7. Ángel Acevedo-Duque & Alejandro Vega-Muñoz & Guido Salazar-Sepúlveda, 2020. "Analysis of Hospitality, Leisure, and Tourism Studies in Chile," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(18), pages 1-20, September.
    8. Shaoliang Xie, 2020. "English Research Article Titles: Cultural and Disciplinary Perspectives," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(2), pages 21582440209, June.
    9. James Hartley, 2015. "Inaccuracies in titles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(1), pages 329-330, April.
    10. Rons, Nadine, 2018. "Bibliometric approximation of a scientific specialty by combining key sources, title words, authors and references," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 12(1), pages 113-132.
    11. John Hudson, 2017. "Identifying economics’ place amongst academic disciplines: a science or a social science?," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(2), pages 735-750, November.
    12. Rafael Ball, 2009. "Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 79(3), pages 667-679, June.

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