Titles in Highly Ranked Multidisciplinary Psychology Journals 1966–2011: More Words and Punctuation Marks Allow for the Communication of More Information

Abstract

Titles of articles in seven highly ranked multidisciplinary psychology journals for every fifth year between 1966 and 2011 (inclusive) were studied in terms of title length, word length, punctuation density, and word pleasantness, activation, and concreteness (assessed by the Dictionary of Affect in Language). Titles grew longer (by three words) and were more frequently punctuated (by one colon or comma for every other article) between 1966 and 2011. This may reflect the increasing complexity of psychology and satisfy readers' requirements for more specific information. There were significant differences among journals (e.g., titles in the Annual Review of Psychology were scored by the Dictionary of Affect as the most pleasant, and those in Psychological Bulletin as the least pleasant) and among categories of journals (e.g., titles in review journals employed longer words than those in research or association journals). Differences were stable across time and were employed to successfully categorize titles from a validation sample.

Developing and validating the A-B-C framework of information diffusion on social media

“…The findings related to punctuation were interesting as they correspond to prior research showing that they impact emotion transmission in computer-mediated content (Rourke et al, 1999), especially when in the titles (e.g. Lupo and Kopelman, 1987; Whissell, 2013). However, given the goal of this study focuses on producing message concepts (Step B), the punctuation findings provided less direct interpretable application, and therefore, they were not considered for the remaining two steps.…”

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

“…Some evidence indicates that titles have been increasing in length over time (Lewison and Hartley ; Webster et al. ; Whissell ), although this varies among journals (Méndez et al. ).…”

“…Longer titles, though, can be more informative, have more searchable key words, and so can be more easily discovered and thus potentially more widely read, especially in databases that place weight on title keywords for information retrieval (Beel and Gipp 2009). Some evidence indicates that titles have been increasing in length over time (Lewison and Hartley 2005;Webster et al 2009;Whissell 2013), although this varies among journals (M endez et al 2014). 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.…”

Are Papers Asking Questions Cited More Frequently in Computer Science?

“…Aside from titles and abstracts, the keywords of articles were also studied, such as in the analysis by Uddin and Khan [16], in which nearly 30,000 papers on obesity were examined and some keyword properties were observed to be positively correlated with citations. A collection of approximately 4500 article titles from psychology journals was inspected by Whissell [17], but the relationship of the titles' various linguistic characteristics with citation impact was not studied.…”