Titles in Veterinary Medicine research articles

Abstract

Titles are the first point of contact between authors and readers. They call for attention and provide concise and exhaustive information on the research. State of the art in the medical field shows that titles have a mean word count ranging from 15.48 to 15.85 and that they can be arranged into four different formats: nominal, full-sentence, compound and question. Veterinary Medicine has not been object of study and is an underrepresented field in genre analytical surveys. This research wants to fill in part this gap by discussing a pilot survey on veterinary research article titles. To this aim, six issues from three veterinary journals were scanned and the samples labelled "original research article" were examined. The corpus, consisting of 74 specimens, was analysed to elicit the mean word count and the format. Results reveal a mean length of 14.06 words per title and the prevalence of nominal and compound titles. These data are shared to offer a preliminary framework that can serve to inform on the practices adopted by veterinary researchers to communicate findings.

Content and Phrasing in Titles of Original Research and Review Articles in 2015: Range of Practice in Four Clinical Journals

“…A present-tense sentence, which is the clearest way to express a conclusion about a result, accounted for 67.9% of results-mention titles in our corpus. Our observations are also consistent with Soler's [19] finding of more full sentences (declaratives, usually in the present tense) in biology RA titles (51%) than medical ones (16%). Biology RAs would be more similar to reports of in vitro or animal models in medicine, and when we checked their prevalence in our corpus a posteriori, we found that the NEJM and BMJ had none whereas the two anesthesiology journals had 17 (almost 13% of their total) and that 8 of them were full sentences.…”

“…These reviews are usually invited submissions, and the opportunity to write them comes once a clinical researcher has gained the respect of peers. We anticipated finding few reviews [19] but nonetheless included this genre to make our work comparable to previous studies [14,15,17,19].…”

“…Q3a through Q3e were concerned with a series of phrase and sentence features studied by linguists [17][18][19] and were coded as follows in this study: full sentence (0, no; 1, yes-a question; and 2, yes-an affirmation); number of parts (continuous variable); punctuation between parts (1, colon; 2, period; 3, dash; 4, semicolon; 5, comma; 6, parentheses; 7, question mark); number of heads in multi-head phrasal titles (ě2 noun or -ing form heads) recorded as a continuous variable; and link between heads (1, and; 2, or; 3, versus or vs.; 4, with as a conjunction; 5, a comma; 6, other). Our separate coding of questions and declarative sentences reflected the intention of analyzing how often options other than a declarative sentence are used for titles specifying results.…”

“…Besides variety in corpus development, methodological or reporting problems have made interpretation difficult. For example, one linguistics study that compared disciplines [19] did not test for statistical significance of differences, although it is difficult to know if studies in fields with small samples have the statistical power for valid comparisons in any case.…”

“…Like the editor-physicians, the linguists took different approaches to building a corpus. One looked only at New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) titles [17], one used a convenience sample of veterinary journals to extract and analyze examples for an ESP course [18], and one compared titles in various disciplines [19], including the "biological sciences"-a category that encompasses bench sciences, for which reporting guidelines development started later [20]. Thus, the literature we reviewed could only provide us with a starting point, suggesting which variables were relevant if we wanted to be able to compare our findings to others'.…”