An analysis of the titles of papers submitted to the UK REF in 2014: authors, disciplines, and stylistic details.

John Hudson

doi:10.1007/s11192-016-2081-4

Abstract

In 2014 over 52,000 academics submitted >155,500 journal articles in 36 different disciplines for assessment in the UK’s four-year Research Evaluation Framework (the REF). In this paper the characteristics of the titles of these papers are assessed. Although these varied considerably between the disciplines, the main findings were that: (i) the lengths of the titles increased with the number of authors in almost all disciplines, (ii) the use of colons and question marks tended to decline with increasing author numbers—although there were a few disciplines, such as economics, where the reverse was evident, (iii) papers published later on in the 4-year period tended to have more authors than those published earlier, and (iv), in some disciplines, the numbers of subsequent citations to papers were higher when the titles were shorter and when they employed colons but lower when they used question marks.

Highlights

Authors of an academic journal paper tend to choose a title with a view to maximising the impact of that paper, perhaps in terms of citations. Hartley (2008) lists thirteen different types of title, including those that state findings and those that ‘bid for attention’
We find some evidence for the tendency noted by Hartley, and in addition evidence from both title length and use of a question mark that for very large author numbers, behaviour tends to resemble that of a small group of authors
The final row relates to a fixed effects regression on all available data in all units of assessment (UoAs), where the dependent variable is the ratio of citations to the UoA mean *,** denotes significance at the 1/5 % levels question mark reduces the number of citations by 15.9 and 19.0 respectively for Clinical Medicine

Summary

Introduction

Authors of an academic journal paper tend to choose a title with a view to maximising the impact of that paper, perhaps in terms of citations. Hartley (2008) lists thirteen different types of title, including those that state findings and those that ‘bid for attention’. Apart from exploring aspects such as title length and the use of colons and question marks, we will be implicitly examining one further aspect of academic work, i.e. the amount of time it takes to complete a paper We cannot do this directly in this research with the data base we have, in future research that may be possible. These papers allow us to evaluate the working habits of academics in different disciplines, with the analysis focusing on the best work in these disciplines because this work was chosen to submit to the REF In doing this we shall be analysing the average number of authors, the length of titles, the use of colons and question marks, and the number of citations.

Literature and expectations

Findings

Conclusions