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

Mary Kerans,Anne Murray,Sergi Sabatè

doi:10.3390/publications4020011

Abstract

Reporting guidelines for clinical research designs emerged in the mid-1990s and have influenced various aspects of research articles, including titles, which have also been subject to changing uses with the growth of electronic database searching and efforts to reduce bias in literature searches. We aimed (1) to learn more about titles in clinical medicine today and (2) to develop an efficient, reliable way to study titles over time and on the fly—for quick application by authors, manuscript editors, translators and instructors. We compared content and form in titles from two general medical journals—the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the British Medical Journal—and two anesthesiology journals (the European Journal of Anaesthesiology and Anesthesiology); we also analyzed the inter-rater reliability of our coding. Significant content differences were found in the frequencies of mentions of methods, results (between general and subspecialty titles), and geographic setting; phrasing differences were found in the prevalence of full-sentence and compound titles (and their punctuation). NEJM titles were significantly shorter, and this journal differed consistently on several features. We conclude that authors must learn to efficiently survey titles for form and content patterns when preparing manuscripts to submit to unfamiliar journals or on resubmitting to a new journal after rejection.

Highlights

Today’s clinical researchers are understandably convinced of the importance of title content and form in English
Some differences were found between a single journal and all the others, and some were between the general medical journals and the subspecialty ones
The main limitation of this study is that when our title corpus was divided by genre, we found we had insufficient statistical power to make comparisons between journals for review article titles by themselves; we analyzed between-journal differences only for the combined research article (RA) and review corpus for most questions. (Reviews did not present this problem for methods and results mentions—Q1 and Q2a—because that content is only relevant to RAs)

Summary

Introduction

Today’s clinical researchers are understandably convinced of the importance of title content and form in English. Whereas potential users of information (for clinical application or citing) once saw titles and abstracts together when browsing their preferred journals in print, readers use time-saving titles-first-or-only search strategies online. Today’s medical researchers are encouraged to obtain and update their reference lists more systematically by doing exhaustive online searches in several indexes and avoiding language filters [2]. A titles-first approach has been shown to be more efficient than a traditional titles-plus-abstract approach for such searches and to yield the same reference results [3]; even large groups dedicated to systematic reviewing

Methods

Results

Conclusion