Length, style, and structural organisation of research article titles: A diachronic and cross-disciplinary study of two journals

Abstract

Crafting titles for research articles (RAs) in different disciplines is important as they can attract and inform the potential reader about the content of such academic pieces. Recent studies into RA titles have paid attention to various aspects such length, style, syntactic structures and lexicon of titles. Using The Bible Translator (TBT) and the Journal of Drug Issues (JDI) as examples of journals in Religion and Health Science respectively, the present study attempted to explore 2,953 titles of RAs published between 1971 and 2018, in order to establish a diachronic comparative analysis of the structural and stylistic patterns used in presenting titles. Following Dietz’ (1995, cf Moattarian & Alibabaee, 2015) taxonomy of analysing titles, this study focused on studying the length, styles, syntactic structures, and demarcating markers of the titles. This study revealed that title length increased over time in both journals. Among the three title styles identified, the Single-Unit Titles decreased, whereas the Double-Unit Title increased in both journals; the frequency of Multiple-Unit Title did not show any regular pattern in the two journals. The Noun Phrase (NP) was the dominant Single-Unit Title which generally decreased over time in its use in both journals. The most commonly found postmodifier, the Prepositional Phrase (PP), decreased in TBT and showed irregular decrease in the JDI. The Colon was the most frequent demarcating marker which increased over time in both journals; pointing to the ‘colonization’ in Research Article (RA) titles. This research has implications for academic writing, pedagogy, theory and further research.