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.
