Syntactic and semantic structure analysis of article titles in analytical chemistry

Abstract

Titles of scientific papers often include words that develop definite syntactic patterns around them. In analytical chemistry, these roles are played by frequently used analysisrelated words which demand an object, such as "analysis of", "analyse" or "analysing". Syntactic patterns of the titles including these words were studied paying particular attention to prepositions which were then collectively expressed by Backus Naur Form (BNF) notations. The patterns can be utilised to extract word strings corresponding to analyte, matrix and analytical procedure, which are the main facets through which we grasp the core ideas in analytical chemistry papers. Facet tabulation of extracted words provides a display easier to see and understand than the titles themselves. In addition, this method can be applied to automatic assignment of facet categories to title words; and the word categories may be used for analysis of titles in other diversified syntactic patterns. This approach can be extended to the analysis of article titles in other disciplines.

A comparison of title words for journal articles and Wikipedia pages: Coverage and stylistic differences?

“…Titles may express the purpose or results of a study, its methods (Méndez; Alcaraz; Salager-Meyer, 2014; Paiva; Lima; Paiva, 2012) or the overall study design (Ubriani;Smith;Katz, 2007). A descriptive chemistry title, for example, may centre around variants of the phrase "an analysis of" (Sano;Fujiwara, 1993). Nevertheless, authors may be inefficient or ignore the function of article titles (Hartley, 2005) and can also find creative solutions by adopting or inventing alternative strategies to attract attention (Hartley, 2007).…”

Translingual alteration of conceptual information in medical translation

“…With a few words, a well‐written journal article title can provide a reader with enough information to decide whether to read the abstract and the article or not. During the past few decades, journal article titles have drawn substantial attention from information scientists (Barnwell, 1980; Bird & Knight, 1975; Buxton & Meadows, 1977; Hamill & Zamora, 1980; Sano & Fujiwara, 1993). Because few studies have ever been conducted on journal article titles in Chinese, little is known about their characteristics in information representation and retrieval, especially in translation as information transfer across languages.…”