Familiarity breeds: clichés in article titles

Goodman, Neville W.

doi:10.3399/bjgp12x659420

Cited by 9 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…A similar rise-and-fall tendency has also been observed for research-related clichés in medical article titles (e.g. “paradigm shift”, “out of the box”) [ 68 ]. In the case of social sciences, a comparison of word frequencies within article titles in history, sociology, economics, and education found history to use rarer terms, which often referred to people or place names [ 69 ].…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Words by the tail: Assessing lexical diversity in scholarly titles using frequency-rank distribution tail fits

et al. 2018

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This research assesses the evolution of lexical diversity in scholarly titles using a new indicator based on zipfian frequency-rank distribution tail fits. At the operational level, while both head and tail fits of zipfian word distributions are more independent of corpus size than other lexical diversity indicators, the latter however neatly outperforms the former in that regard. This benchmark-setting performance of zipfian distribution tails proves extremely handy in distinguishing actual patterns in lexical diversity from the statistical noise generated by other indicators due to corpus size fluctuations. From an empirical perspective, analysis of Web of Science (WoS) article titles from 1975 to 2014 shows that the lexical concentration of scholarly titles in Natural Sciences & Engineering (NSE) and Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) articles increases by a little less than 8% over the whole period. With the exception of the lexically concentrated Mathematics, Earth & Space, and Physics, NSE article titles all increased in lexical concentration, suggesting a probable convergence of concentration levels in the near future. As regards to SSH disciplines, aggregation effects observed at the disciplinary group level suggests that, behind the stable concentration levels of SSH disciplines, a cross-disciplinary homogenization of the highest word frequency ranks may be at work. Overall, these trends suggest a progressive standardization of title wording in scientific article titles, as article titles get written using an increasingly restricted and cross-disciplinary set of words.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 64%

Words by the tail: Assessing lexical diversity in scholarly titles using frequency-rank distribution tail fits

et al. 2018

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“…An analysis of changing computingrelated term frequencies over time in the titles, abstracts or keywords of library and information science articles discovered that terms that rose and declined in frequency tended to be associated with topical issues or terminologies (Thelwall & Maflahi, 2015). A study of research-related clichés in medical article titles (e.g., "paradigm shift", "out of the box") also found these to rise and fall in popularity over time (Goodman, 2012). Within economics 1890-2012 there have also been similar popularity changes in individual terms, such as tax, which was the second most popular substantive title term in the 1950s but was out of the top 10 before then and again after the 1960s (Guo, Zhang, Ju, Chen, Chen, & Li, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research

Thelwall

2016

Scientometrics

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“…However, for many authors, clichés are highly discouraged to prevent miscommunication, confusion, and even annoyance (Debakey & Debakey, 1983; Gastel & Day, 2016; N. W. Goodman, 2005; N. Goodman 2012).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

I’ll Read That!: What Title Elements Attract Readers to an Article?

Hallock

Bennett

2020

Teaching of Psychology

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The title of an article is the first chance at catching a reader’s attention. We set to develop a list of title attributes that lead to attractive titles in psychology papers, which could then be used to help instruct undergraduate students on how to write good titles for their papers and projects. Currently, research into successful elements that comprise an effective title is generally limited to publication metrics (the number of hits and citations an article has). Here, we created and administered a survey to 99 undergraduate students to rate the effectiveness of titles of psychology papers that varied in length, use of colons, acronyms, clichés, being results-oriented, and phrased the title as a question. We then reworded these titles as the opposite choice (e.g., we made a longer title shorter or took the colon out of a title without changing the meaning or length). We found that participants significantly preferred long over short titles, titles containing colons over the absence of a colon, and titles phrased as questions. We hope our results aid in the instruction of writing in the discipline, and that undergraduate psychology students and authors alike can develop more effective and attractive titles to attract attention from scholars and invite broader audiences to read their work.

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Familiarity breeds: clichés in article titles

Cited by 9 publications

References 7 publications

Words by the tail: Assessing lexical diversity in scholarly titles using frequency-rank distribution tail fits

Words by the tail: Assessing lexical diversity in scholarly titles using frequency-rank distribution tail fits

Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research

I’ll Read That!: What Title Elements Attract Readers to an Article?

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