Research Article Titled Research Articles

Linguistic Characteristics of Research Article Titles in National and International ELT Journals

Researchers have extensively studied the linguistic characteristics of research article (RA) titles. However, no research has investigated RA titles viewed from research design types published in national and international English Language Teaching (ELT) journals. Thus, the present study aims to fill this gap by investigating the average word length, syntactic structure, and syntactic structure type based on research design. This study used a comparative mixed method design to analyze 120 RA titles published in 2022-2023. The average length of titles was analyzed by counting the parts of speech of the tiles, the syntactic structures of titles were analyzed using the Framework of Cheng et al. (2012), and syntactic structure types based on research design were analyzed by reading the method section of the articles. Results indicate that the average length of the RA titles was 12 words in national journals and 13 words in international journals. Nominal structure was the most used RA title type in national journals, while compound structure was the most used in international journals. Furthermore, the nominal structure was often used for experimental design in international journals, while it was often used for descriptive study design in national journals. The compound and Verb-ing phrase structures were often used for case study design in both international and national journals. In conclusion, there are important differences and similarities in RA title characteristics between the two groups of ELT journal rankings. The findings contribute to the scholarship on the contrastive aspect of titling practices in English for Publishing Purposes.

Assessing the accuracy of MT and AI tools in translating humanities or social sciences Arabic research titles into English: Evidence from Google Translate, Gemini, and ChatGPT

Breakthroughs and advances in translation technology by virtue of AI-powered MT tools and techniques contributed significantly to providing near-perfect translation. This study aims to evaluate the accuracy of three translation technologies (Google Translate, Gemini, and ChatGPT) in translating multidisciplinary Arabic research titles in the Humanities and Social Sciences into English. A corpus of 163 titles of Arabic research articles from various disciplines, including media studies, literature, linguistics, education, and political science, was extracted from a Scopus-indexed journal, namely Dirasat: Human and Social Sciences Series. The research methodology in the present study lends itself largely to Koponen’s (2010) translation error strategy framework. Based on the data analysis, the findings showed that the renditions provided by these programs were categorically marked with either sense or syntax errors, which often rendered the translations inaccurate. Many polysemous terms with multiple related senses were mistranslated. The results showed that the Gemini translations contained the least errors. In contrast, the human translations contained the least mistranslation and diction errors. Google Translate and ChatGPT, on the other hand, contained the highest number of equivalence-based errors. Unexpectedly, the human translations contained the highest number of syntactic errors, reflecting a lack of target language proficiency. The study's conclusions and findings would be beneficial to translators, students, and scholars who may consider translating their Arabic study research titles and abstracts through the most commonly used AI tools.

Academic “click bait”: A diachronic investigation into the use of rhetorical part in pragmatics research article titles

This study reports on a diachronic investigation into the under-explored practice of using a rhetorical part – an unconventional, informationally non-compulsory part involving the use of rhetorical device(s) – in compound titles of published pragmatics research articles (RAs). By analyzing 2263 compound RA titles drawn from two high-profile international journals in pragmatics published during three periods of time (i.e., 1993–2002, 2003–2012, 2013–2022), we show that (a) the overall distribution of compound RA titles involving a rhetorical part has shown a statistically significant increase across the periods concerned, and that (b) rhetorical devices used in the rhetorical part mainly include quotations, rhetorical questions, metaphors, parodies, alliterations, and repetition, with quotations being the only type whose occurrence frequency has been steadily increasing across the three periods studied. The increasing use of a rhetorical part is attributed to the competitive context of international academic publication and the inherent characteristic of the pragmatics discipline. Hopefully, this study could provide new evidence for the transition to post-academic writing style as well as the documented rhetorical marketization of the academic genres, and inform academic title writing in practice.

Syntactic structures of Turkish research article titles in medicine and engineering

The title is of vital importance to research articles as it summarizes the content in several words and grabs the attention of readers. When selecting articles pertinent to their research, the prevalence of online publication leads readers to use online search engines like Google Scholar, which generally displays the first few words of a title, making the title highly important. This study aimed to investigate some key features, such as length, style, syntactic structure and punctuation marks of titles in Turkish research articles in medicine and engineering. To this end, we selected 1,200 titles in four leading journals publishing research articles in these disciplines. As a tool to collect data, document analysis was used in the study to analyze such features of titles and in analyzing the data, descriptive analysis technique was used. The study revealed that both medicine and engineering have almost the equivalent title length. Titles in both disciplines are dominated by single-unit ones and both single-unit and compound titles are predominated by nominal group construction. The results also suggested some disciplinary differences: Compound titles were more common in medicine than in engineering. Medical titles appear to have used more varied syntactic structures in forming titles. Moreover, medical titles have shown a high degree of complexity in terms of punctuation usage. The differences might be attributed to disciplinary practices set out in these two fields. The results of the present study will provide novice writers with ample opportunity to construct their titles as best they can while maintaining their effort to build and enhance their academic writing skills.

Do linguistic features of research article titles affect received online attention? A corpus-based analysis

Purpose Scientific impact is traditionally assessed with citation-based metrics. Recently, altmetric indices have been introduced to measure scientific impact both within academia and among the general public. However, little research has investigated the association between the linguistic features of research article titles and received online attention. To address this issue, the authors examined in the present study the relationship between a series of title features and altmetric attention scores.Design/methodology/approach The data included 8,658 titles of Science articles. The authors extracted six features from the title corpus (i.e. mean word length, lexical sophistication, lexical density, title length, syntactic dependency length and sentiment score). The authors performed Spearman’s rank analyses to analyze the correlations between these features and online impact. The authors then conducted a stepwise backward multiple regression to identify predictors for the articles' online impact.Findings The correlation analyses revealed weak but significant correlations between all six title features and the altmetric attention scores. The regression analysis showed that four linguistic features of titles (mean word length, lexical sophistication, title length and sentiment score) have modest predictive effects on the online impact of research articles.Originality/value In the internet era with the widespread use of social media and online platforms, it is becoming increasingly important for researchers to adapt to the changing context of research evaluation. This study identifies several linguistic features that deserve scholars’ attention in the writing of article titles. It also has practical implications for academic administrators and pedagogical implications for instructors of academic writing courses.

More diversity, more complexity, but more flexibility: research article titles in TESOL Quarterly, 1967–2022

More diversity, more complexity, but more flexibility: research article titles in TESOL Quarterly, 1967–2022

Supervised Relation Extraction Between Suicide-Related Entities and Drugs: Development and Usability Study of an Annotated PubMed Corpus.

Drug-induced suicide has been debated as a crucial issue in both clinical and public health research. Published research articles contain valuable data on the drugs associated with suicidal adverse events. An automated process that extracts such information and rapidly detects drugs related to suicide risk is essential but has not been well established. Moreover, few data sets are available for training and validating classification models on drug-induced suicide. This study aimed to build a corpus of drug-suicide relations containing annotated entities for drugs, suicidal adverse events, and their relations. To confirm the effectiveness of the drug-suicide relation corpus, we evaluated the performance of a relation classification model using the corpus in conjunction with various embeddings. We collected the abstracts and titles of research articles associated with drugs and suicide from PubMed and manually annotated them along with their relations at the sentence level (adverse drug events, treatment, suicide means, or miscellaneous). To reduce the manual annotation effort, we preliminarily selected sentences with a pretrained zero-shot classifier or sentences containing only drug and suicide keywords. We trained a relation classification model using various Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer embeddings with the proposed corpus. We then compared the performances of the model with different Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer-based embeddings and selected the most suitable embedding for our corpus. Our corpus comprised 11,894 sentences extracted from the titles and abstracts of the PubMed research articles. Each sentence was annotated with drug and suicide entities and the relationship between these 2 entities (adverse drug events, treatment, means, and miscellaneous). All of the tested relation classification models that were fine-tuned on the corpus accurately detected sentences of suicidal adverse events regardless of their pretrained type and data set properties. To our knowledge, this is the first and most extensive corpus of drug-suicide relations.

Syntactic structure and rhetorical combinations of Iranian English research article titles in medicine and applied linguistics: A cross-disciplinary study

This corpus-based cross-disciplinary study investigated the syntactic structures and rhetorical combinations of 200 research article titles in two disciplines, namely, medicine (100) and applied linguistics (100). The RA titles were selected from four reputable Iranian English journals. The authors were all Iranian researchers in these two disciplines. The titles were analyzed in light of Dietz taxonomy. First, the frequencies and percentages of each syntactic and rhetorical construction occurrence have been calculated. Next, the authors performed a t-test regarding title length and the chi-square test to decide whether syntactic or rhetorical construction is a discipline-specific convention. The findings revealed thatmedical titles were longer than the linguistic ones. The frequency and percentage of both single- and multi-unit RA titles were essentially the same in both disciplines. Concerning the syntactic components of single-unit RA titles, the most frequently used structure was the nominal construction, followed by verbal and prepositional ones. The most recurrent syntactic components of the nominal structure in both disciplines were post- and pre-modified, with medical titles overtaking the linguistic titles in all nominal categories. In terms of verbal constructions, the dominant structure in medicine was the full sentence, and in applied linguistics, gerund phrases. Regarding the rhetorical components of multi-unit RA titles, medical titles took precedence over the linguistic titles in using the topic method. The topic scope and topic description organization are mostly reported in applied linguistics titles. In this study, however, two new rhetorical combinations were identified. The chi-square test results only confirmed the verbal structures of single-unit and the rhetorical combinations of multi-unit RA titles as distinctive features for each discipline.

Hybridity Across Linguistic Studies

This study investigates the hybridity across linguistic studies from 2017 to 2019. It specifically attempts to figure out the trends of hybrid linguistic areas. To have a clear insight into the issue, a qualitative text analysis was adopted as the design of study. As the data sources, 304 research articles in linguistics were successfully retrieved from the digital data bases of internationally reputable linguistic journals. From each year, the newest released articles were purposively selected as the data sources. To have the clear insight into the hybrid areas across linguistic studies, the initial analysis was carried out on the titles of research articles. Further, analysis was also conducted on the abstracts and research questions. Based on the analysis on the titles, abstracts and research questions, it was found that there were 16 types of hybridity across linguistic studies from 2017 to 2019. The two most frequent hybrid linguistic fields in sequence encompass ‘Critical Discourse Analysis + Multimodality’ and ‘Critical Discourse Analysis + Systemic Functional Linguistics’. It is expected that the results of this study contributes to provide the insight into the possibility of mixing different areas of linguistic studies as a way of solving human’s growing complex humanistic problems.

Public Reaction to Scientific Research via Twitter Sentiment Prediction

Abstract Purpose Social media users share their ideas, thoughts, and emotions with other users. However, it is not clear how online users would respond to new research outcomes. This study aims to predict the nature of the emotions expressed by Twitter users toward scientific publications. Additionally, we investigate what features of the research articles help in such prediction. Identifying the sentiments of research articles on social media will help scientists gauge a new societal impact of their research articles. Design/methodology/approach Several tools are used for sentiment analysis, so we applied five sentiment analysis tools to check which are suitable for capturing a tweet's sentiment value and decided to use NLTK VADER and TextBlob. We segregated the sentiment value into negative, positive, and neutral. We measure the mean and median of tweets’ sentiment value for research articles with more than one tweet. We next built machine learning models to predict the sentiments of tweets related to scientific publications and investigated the essential features that controlled the prediction models. Findings We found that the most important feature in all the models was the sentiment of the research article title followed by the author count. We observed that the tree-based models performed better than other classification models, with Random Forest achieving 89% accuracy for binary classification and 73% accuracy for three-label classification. Research limitations In this research, we used state-of-the-art sentiment analysis libraries. However, these libraries might vary at times in their sentiment prediction behavior. Tweet sentiment may be influenced by a multitude of circumstances and is not always immediately tied to the paper's details. In the future, we intend to broaden the scope of our research by employing word2vec models. Practical implications Many studies have focused on understanding the impact of science on scientists or how science communicators can improve their outcomes. Research in this area has relied on fewer and more limited measures, such as citations and user studies with small datasets. There is currently a critical need to find novel methods to quantify and evaluate the broader impact of research. This study will help scientists better comprehend the emotional impact of their work. Additionally, the value of understanding the public's interest and reactions helps science communicators identify effective ways to engage with the public and build positive connections between scientific communities and the public. Originality/value This study will extend work on public engagement with science, sociology of science, and computational social science. It will enable researchers to identify areas in which there is a gap between public and expert understanding and provide strategies by which this gap can be bridged.

A proposal to promote diversity in journal research article titles.

A proposal to promote diversity in journal research article titles.

Making sense of “buzzword” as a term through co-occurrences analysis

The study argues that while the existing research on buzzwords mainly involves the functional and pragmatic analysis of their individual specimen, such as “engagement”, “synergy” or “development”, an alternative approach can be implemented to look into the nature and immediate implications behind the term in question. The suggested approach involves investigating the occurrences of the term proper as opposed to analysing individual buzzwords. The authors hypothise and demonstrate that linguistic context of the term “buzzword”, i.e. the peculiarities of its occurrence alongside different language units and patterns, may provide credible inferences concerning the key properties attached to the term and afford some illuminating perspective on the prevailing attitudes towards it. The study uses titles of research and newspaper articles retrieved from Google Scholar as material for the research due to better representation of the term in titles as opposed to full texts, as well as titles' higher informativity and better descriptive saturation. Apart from the prevailing focus on the immediate linguistic context surrounding the term, the inferences made in this study also stem from the frequency data showing how often a certain feature of buzzwords is being mentioned in the titles. The study showed that while the greatest emphasis is being placed on the field of use and temporal lifecycle of buzzwords, the attitudes towards them can be best of all described by examining the place of the term in oppositions. As illustrated in the paper, these oppositions reflect the idea of the term's inferior status by opposing it to more favourable concepts.

A lexical and syntactic study of research article titles in Library Science and Scientometrics

Title of a research article is an abstract of the abstract. Titles play a decisive role in convincing readers at first sight whether articles are worth reading or not. Not only do research article titles show how carefully words are chosen by authors, but also reflect disciplinary differences in terms of title words and structure between hard sciences and soft sciences. This study examined the lexical density and syntactic structure of 690 research article titles chosen from five Library Science and Scientometrics journals, aiming to reveal disciplinary differences. The result suggested both Library Science and Scientometrics have almost the same title length and the prevalent usage of Nominal Phrase (NP) to govern the title structure. The result also stated some disciplinary differences: Library Science demonstrates more punctuation complexity, particularly a greater frequency in using colons; but Scientometrics shows more involvement of words related to research methods, which is an indicator to papers’ scientific value, and more usage of declarative Full Sentence (FS) structure, which were mostly discovered in the research articles in hard sciences.

Quoted speech in linguistics research article titles: patterns of use and effects on citations

This paper investigates the uses and scholarly impact of quoted/direct speech in research article titles (e.g., "I Know I'm Generalizing but…": How Teachers' Perceptions Influence ESL Learner Placement) across the 50 highest-listed linguistics journals according to Clarivate Analytics’ inCites Journal Citation Reports. The aims of the study were to: (1) uncover the prevalence of titles featuring quoted speech between 1980 and 2019, (2) describe how directly reported speech is utilised structurally in article titles, and (3) investigate the effects of various patterns of use of quotations on articles’ age-weighted citation rates. 640 linguistics articles with speech act titles were uncovered, occurring with an incidence of 1.8% in the dataset (n = 36,438), although their prevalence has risen significantly since 2004. Structural analysis revealed 90.9% of quotations were contained in the first segment of a compound title, serving to create an information gap (often for the purposes of provoking interest or intrigue), which is resolved in the second segment; the research article’s topic. Regression analysis showed that speech act titles were significant negative determinants of articles’ age-weighted citations, particularly the prevalent pattern of compound structures featuring a quotation phrased as a declarative. The length of the quotation was found to exert no significant effect, although quotations that were not marked by single or double quotation marks were found to have an especially suppressed scholarly impact.

Assessment of Titles of Original Research Articles Published in Two Peer-Reviewed Journals of Community Medicine and Public Health from India

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.

Identifying the Characteristics and Differences between Titles in Nursing Research Articles

The study aimed to investigate the characteristics of 500 research article titles in nursing and explore any differences between the three types of journals: international high impact factor journals, domestic journals published in Japanese, and domestic journal published in English. The nursing article titles showed significant differences according to the journal type, which indicates the danger of generalizing discipline-specific norms. The results also showed that the article titles of international high impact factor journals show significant differences in four features: style, length, structure, and content. These results are useful, especially for novice writers who use English as a foreign language.

Английские пословицы в заголовках научных статей

The study aims to determine relevance of using the popular English proverbs in scientific discourse. The work is carried out using the material of titles of scientific articles dealing with economic topics. The researchers have identified 9 proverbs related to the material aspect of human life, which can be found among titles of research articles. The work describes the structure of the titles that incorporate proverbs, analyses their transformation by authors of the articles. The study is novel in that it assesses the place and describes the functions of such a form of oral lore (genre of folklore) as a proverb in scientific discourse, more specifically, in titles of scientific articles written in English. As a result, it was determined how frequently, in what form and for what purpose authors include proverbs in titles of their scientific works and how the meaning of a proverb is articulated in an article abstract.

A Linguistic Analysis of Petroleum-Related English Research Article Titles

Research article titles constitute a special type of text - concise, clear, and informative. The specificity of article titles is determined by a number of factors such as the object of research, the author’s personal style, academic tradition, the field of study among them. Today, article titles from different scientific areas are in the focus of scientific attention. This article presents the results of a linguistic analysis aimed at determining similarities and differences of research article titles from journals on petroleum science. The theoretical value has the descriptive analysis of technical article titles which can further be compared with titles from other areas of research. According to the obtained results, the titles were 15 words on average. The overwhelming majority (98%) of the titles had a nominative character; 2% were subject-predicate sentences, mainly, interrogative. Words were seven characters long, on average. Nouns, function words and adjectives were the most frequently occurred word classes; on the contrary, numerals, adverbs and verbs - the least frequent words. The most common punctuation marks were hyphens, commas, and colons, indicating the complexity of technical terms, enumeration and elaboration of the object of research and geography of petroleum sites. Names of petroleum reservoirs, formations and basins with their location specification, multisyllabic professional terms and abbreviations, constituting 30% of the article titles’ lengths on the average, can be considered special features of article titles on petroleum science. For this reason, a long title is typical of petroleum-related research articles. Additionally, more articles were devoted to richer petroleum reserves.

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

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.

Using a Diabetes Discussion Forum and Wikipedia to Detect the Alignment of Public Interests and the Research Literature

Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects millions of people worldwide. It is therefore unsurprising that there is a high volume of public discussions, resources, and research tackling various aspects of the disease. This study describes a new method for identifying areas of public interest in issues like diabetes and compares them to the topics being discussed in research. We tested our method by using posts from a popular diabetes discussion forum (DiabeticConnect), pages (articles) about diabetes published on Wikipedia, and the titles and abstracts of research articles about diabetes from the Scopus database. Tags assigned to each post in the discussion forum were used along with the post itself to compute a Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LLDA) model, which was then used to classify the Wikipedia pages and research articles. The resulting classifications were then used to compare the prevalence of the topics found in the discussion forum with that in the other two sources. The results show that the public interest in diabetes is not necessarily addressed by researchers. More importantly, the alignment and misalignment in the changes in relative interest over the various topics are evidence that LLDA modeling can be useful for comparing a public corpus, like a diabetes forum, and an academic one, like research article titles and abstracts. The success of using LLDA to classify research articles based on the tags assigned to posts in a public discussion forum shows that this a promising method for better understanding how the scientific community responds to public interests and needs.