Increasing field complexity revealed through article title analyses

White, Arden; Hernandez, Nelda Rae

doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(199112)42:10<731::aid-asi6>3.0.co;2-w

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 3 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…The increasing syntactic complexity and semantic richness of CR titles are not only related to increasing length (see Section 4.2 above), but also to the increasing number of compound nouns and adjectives used in Block C as a way to condense information (SalagerMeyer 1984 Regarding the increase in the use of compound words over time, we could put forward the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the syntactic complexity of CR titles and the complexity of the research field, as has been suggested by White and Hernández (1991) in relation to research article titles.…”

Section: Compound Wordsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Titling and authorship practices in medical case reports: a diachronic study

Salager‐Meyer¹,

Ariza

Briceño³

2014

CAM

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This paper is a diachronic analysis of a corpus of 180 titles drawn from Case Reports (CRs) published in the BMJ and BMJ Case Reports between 1840 and 2009. The corpus was divided into three blocks, and the frequency of occurrence of 69 text-internal variables was recorded in each title. Between-block comparisons were carried out, and Student's t-tests IntroductionSince before Hippocrates, case reports (CRs) have made, and still make, a valuable contribution to the advancement of medical science (Friedell 1973; Morgan 1985;Pascal 1985;Simpson and Griggs 1985;Morris 1989). McCarthy and Reilly (2000) report, for example, that a search of the MEDLINE database from 1996 to 2000, using the Medical Subject Heading term 'case report' , retrieved more than 140,000 citations. More recently a search of Web of Science using the same MSH term retrieved 160 articles from 1953 and 4,011 from (cited in Gawrylewski 2007. Communication & MedicineGiven the unpredictable nature of medicine, many medical professionals will indeed have come across a patient who has not been a textbook case. The patient may have presented in an unusual way, had a strange pathology, or reacted to a medical intervention in a manner that has not been seen before. The publication of such novelties and curiosities as CRs has for many centuries been a fundamental way of sharing knowledge and conveying medical experience, and throughout history there have been famous CRs that have helped shape the way we view health and disease (Jamjoom et al. 2009;Salager-Meyer 2012).In recent years, though, and especially since the 1990s (Maisonneuve et al. 2010), CRs have come under scrutiny and disfavor among some members of the medical scientific community, and they are now frequently relegated to the lowest rank in the hierarchy of study design. Indeed, there are those who argue, for example, that CRs are 'passé, trivial ' (Rose and Corn 1984), and that they are increasingly irrelevant in current medical practice and education (Yadav 2006) because their obscurity and rarity appeal only to a specialized few, and because they add little to everyday medical practice. What is more, so argue the 'opponents' of CR publishing, their anecdotal nature lacks the scientific rigor of large, wellconducted studies. CRs have therefore fallen down the hierarchical ladder of medical evidence, and many 64 Françoise Salager-Meyer et al. medical journals, for 'shortage of page space' , now refuse to publish CRs (for a thorough analysis of the growing obsolescence of the psychiatric case report as a knowledge-bearing text, see Berkenkotter 2008).Another reason why this 'endangered species' (Rose and Corn 1984) sometimes receives low esteem and 'is frequently dismissed -unfairly so -as unscientific' (Simpson and Griggs 1985: 403) is because CRs are considered to be non-citable items (Morris 1989), thus lowering the impact factor of journals where citation data rule decisions ( Van der Wall and Wilde 2009; Maisonnneuve et al. 2010). Indeed, Patsopoulos et al. (2005) found that ...

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Section: Compound Wordsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Titling and authorship practices in medical case reports: a diachronic study

Salager‐Meyer¹,

Ariza

Briceño³

2014

CAM

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“…We found that title word count of papers submitted to and published by Functional Ecology increased only very slightly over time, an effect only observable after controlling for changes in other features of titles. Increasing word counts of titles over time may reflect increasing complexity of scientific disciplines (White and Hernandez ) and the trend toward an increase in the number of authors on papers (White ; Yitzhaki ). But studies are mixed on whether papers with longer or shorter titles are cited more; some have found that title word count does not predict the number of citations a paper will receive after publication (Stremersch et al.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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“…He also argues that they may also facilitate the rapid publication of results about which the authors are not fully confident (Ball 2009 , p. 677). In addition there is a trend for longer titles (White and Hernandez 1991 ). There is also evidence to link the structure and style of the title to the number of authors, which in itself has tended to increase over time (Hudson 1996 ).…”

Section: Literature and Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An analysis of the titles of papers submitted to the UK REF in 2014: authors, disciplines, and stylistic details

Hudson

2016

Scientometrics

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In 2014 over 52,000 academics submitted >155,500 journal articles in 36 different disciplines for assessment in the UK’s four-year Research Evaluation Framework (the REF). In this paper the characteristics of the titles of these papers are assessed. Although these varied considerably between the disciplines, the main findings were that: (i) the lengths of the titles increased with the number of authors in almost all disciplines, (ii) the use of colons and question marks tended to decline with increasing author numbers—although there were a few disciplines, such as economics, where the reverse was evident, (iii) papers published later on in the 4-year period tended to have more authors than those published earlier, and (iv), in some disciplines, the numbers of subsequent citations to papers were higher when the titles were shorter and when they employed colons but lower when they used question marks.

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Increasing field complexity revealed through article title analyses

Cited by 12 publications

References 3 publications

Titling and authorship practices in medical case reports: a diachronic study

Titling and authorship practices in medical case reports: a diachronic study

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

An analysis of the titles of papers submitted to the UK REF in 2014: authors, disciplines, and stylistic details

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