Research article title content and form in high-ranked international clinical medicine journals

Abstract

Readers now scan keyword-generated search results from online databases to select articles rather than browse tables of contents, increasing the importance of titles in isolation. We aimed to describe clinical research titles in a corpus from two of the four most prestigious general medicine journals plus two high-ranked specialty journals published in 2017. The 2017 corpus was compared to a comparable 2015 corpus to describe titling in all four top-ranked general journals and two specialties 20 years after the advent of clinical research reporting guidelines. We also explored a statistical way to confirm corpus size adequacy. Two observers coded and reached consensus on the following characteristics: methods and results mentions (main content of interest); patient, clinical context, and geography mentions; number of parts and their punctuation; and positioning of methods mention. Title length was also compared. Main findings included differences between journals (notably methods mention) and between general and specialty journals (notably results mention). The 95% confidence intervals for percentages in the full corpus of 274 titles (60–70 per journal) were narrow, suggesting that observations reflect real proportions; the intervals for journal subcorpora were wider but accurate enough to guide writing. We suggest ways authors, instructors, and editors/translators can use the findings.