Assessment of titles of original research articles published in two peer-reviewed journals of community medicine and public health from India: A descriptive study

Abstract

Introduction: Title is the first face of research article which is the mostly read part after publication. Objective: The objective of this study is to assess the titles of original research articles published in two peer-reviewed journals of community medicine and public health from India. Materials and Methods: This descriptive study included 340 original articles from the Indian Journal of Community Medicine and 140 articles the Indian Journal of Public Health published during 2010 to 2018. These articles were downloaded from the official website of the journals. The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee. A predesigned proforma pertaining to fulfill objective consisting of Setting, Population, Intervention, Conclusion, Endpoint and Design (SPICED) criteria, length, typology, punctuation, abbreviations, use of keywords in title, was used. Data were entered in Excel and analyzed by using Epi Info version 7 for frequencies and percentages. Results: Out of 480 original research articles, 48.54% of the articles had title with 16 to 30 words. Four hundred and forty-two (92.08%) titles were of declarative type and 42.08% titles were of topic only type. Out of 200 articles where punctuation or abbreviations were used maximum 83% were with colon. 46.46% articles quoted 5–8 keywords in the articles. Only 9.58% titles were with all the keywords quoted. Only one experimental study had title with SPICED criteria while no observational study had title was with all criteria. Conclusions: Most of the titles were of descriptive type and less use of keywords in titles was there in the formulation of titles along with scarce use of all components of SPICED criteria.