Abstract
This article investigated the English research article (RA) titles across different disciplines and cultures. To this end, 600 RA titles in the Chinese context and 600 RA titles in the international context were collected from six disciplines, which are grouped as social and natural sciences. The frequency of title types, their subtypes, and title length are calculated in terms of cultural and disciplinary factors. The result showed a significant difference in title types and subtypes along two dimensions. It suggested that Chinese culture and language and the discourse practice of academic publication are responsible for the salient features of English titles by Chinese scholars. The suggestion for further study is to collect more titles from other disciplines and cultural contexts to verify the results.
Highlights
The results indicate that nominal group titles are preferred as a linguistic strategy of scientific discourse, that FS construction of research paper titles are frequent in biological sciences, CP titles in SS, and that there exist differences in title length across languages and disciplines
There is revealed a striking difference between the titles across cultural contexts and disciplines, which is reflected by the distribution of title type in terms of two factors: discipline and culture
Some common tendencies are found in the present study along the two dimensions, compared with the previous studies, the current study revealed the difference in title length, the distribution of title types, and the distribution of subtype title structure between different cultures and disciplines
Summary
There has been an increasing interest in the importance of scientific research article (RA) titles to determine whether it is effective or not (Anthony, 2001; Bird & Knight, 1975; Buxton & Meadows, 1977; Byrne, 1975; Day, 1995; Diodato, 1982; Haggan, 2004; Harmon & Gross, 2009; Hartley, 2005, 2007a, 2008; Nahl-Jakobovits & Jakobovits, 1987; Peritz, 1984; Soler, 2007, 2011; Swales, 1990; Whissell, 1999; White & Hernandez, 1991; Yitzhaki, 1994, 2002). The results indicate that nominal group titles are preferred as a linguistic strategy of scientific discourse, that FS construction of research paper titles are frequent in biological sciences, CP titles in SS, and that there exist differences in title length across languages and disciplines. To secure the comparability of the corpora, especially the cross-cultural corpora, this article followed the method, tertia comparationis, proposed by Connor and Moreno (2005) in contrastive rhetoric research This method was adopted by Soler (2011) to prevent the limitations of imbalance of corpora in her comparative/contrast analysis of scientific paper titles in English and Spanish. Based on the quantitative results, the reasons that would cause the differences between titles were discussed
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