Neutral, risky or provocative? Trends in titling practices in complementary and alternative medicine articles (1995-2016)

Abstract

This paper analyses the length and titling practices in the under-researched field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Our corpus consisted of 360 articles published between 1995 and 2016 in three CAM journals. The length and frequency of Nominal, Verbal and Question titles were compared across genres and over time. A 40% overall title length increase was found. Our study confirms that title length is related to genre, research paper (RP) titles being significantly longer than reviews and case report titles. Moreover, RP titles were found to exhibit the greatest length increase over time. In this study, Nominal titles were the most frequent title type in the three genres and over the 20-year period analyzed, although they slightly decreased over time. In contrast, Verbal (full sentence) titles increased over time, especially in RP titles. Question titles were the only type that significantly increased over time, especially in review article titles. These findings were compared with those obtained by previous titleology research on conventional (CONV) medicine paper titles. We conclude that although CAM and CONV are divergent approaches to health care, their titling practices revealed more similarities than differences. These similarities may reflect a growing tendency towards practices associated with popular media to attract readership, such as use of Question and Verbal titles. This competition for attention could have serious implications for health care if the trend increases for clinicians to rely on the titles of relevant articles to make therapeutic decisions.