Scientific documents are “the central medium for the dissemination and exchange of ideas” (Bowker, 2005, p. 126), and therefore represent the key element in the practice of science (Callon et al., 1983; Latour and Woolgar, 1986). In many scientific fields the principal type of scientific document is a research article (“paper”). Titles and the choice of words in them play two important roles: they inform the reader about the content of the paper, while at the same time attempting to trigger their attention (Bazerman, 1985, 1988; Ball, 2009). For the first role, the words are chosen to “convey credible information for a given population of producer-readers” (Callon et al., 1983, p. 199). Thus, the choice of words is a negotiation process reflecting both the behavior of individual authors and scholarly collectives (Hyland, 2004, 2012; Nagano, 2015). Authors choose particular words to denote their alliance with particular communities, sub-communities, and lines of thought. Thus, titles serve a very important third role, which is the denotation of academic identity. According to Hyland (2012) “we use language as the raw materials for the presentation of ourselves to the world and that what we say and write aligns us with or separates us from other people and their positions” (p. x). Identity is socially and historically constituted by individuals through their social relations and is thus something that does not belong within an individual, but between persons (Vygotsky, 1978).

Titles are co-constructed within the “conceptual frames” (Hyland, 2012) of disciplines (Nagano, 2015). The usage of the acceptable discourse is a sign that a novice author is being socialized into a discipline (Becher and Trowler, 2001). We see that as early as dissertation work (Demarest and Sugimoto, 2015), where it was possible to discern among three disciplines (physics, psychology, and philosophy) based on a limited set of terms they used. Nagano (2015) claimed that the choices made in title construction are “largely matter of custom, habit, and copying others” (p. 134). The great influence of individual disciplines was supported by a number of studies that found greater differences in title characteristics between rather than within disciplines (van Wesel et al., 2014). This was also supported by the finding that time is the most important factor related to title length (White, 1991).

In relation to their role as attention triggers, titles are perceived to be an integral part of a strategy to attract an audience (Thelwall, 2017). Many studies from researchers from a number of fields: scientometrics, medicine, ecology (ECL), and linguistics, among others, focused on identifying title characteristics that may be correlated with high impact. Thus, these studies take a normative stance, trying to assist researchers in choosing title characteristics that have been found to lead to more citations. These studies range in the size of the corpus they use: from 50 articles (Jacques and Sebire, 2010) to nearly 20 million articles (Ball, 2009). The following title characteristics have been most studied: length, presence of non-alphanumeric characters, syntax/type, and word analysis.

The title length has been considered important for the retrieval of articles, which is an essential step toward reading, and eventually citing them. Namely, longer titles contain more words and, therefore, more potential keywords, thus increasing the potential for retrieval. On the other hand, longer titles may be “more difficult to digest and may reduce the attraction factor” (Hudson, 2016, p. 878). Shorter titles may also indicate a narrower scope. The results of the studies examining title lengths did not universally support the hypothesis of the greater impact of longer titles. Positive correlation between length and impact has been found for 25 most cited articles in medical journals published in top four journals in 2005 (Jacques and Sebire, 2010), and general and internal medicine articles (van Wesel et al., 2014). However, a very large number of studies found the negative relationship in biology (Didegah and Thelwall, 2013), social sciences (Didegah and Thelwall, 2013), sociology (van Wesel et al., 2014), and psychology (Subotic and Mukherjee, 2014). Others have found no correlation; e.g., in chemistry (Didegah and Thelwall, 2013), management science (Nair and Gibbert, 2016), ECL (Fox and Burns, 2015), or in articles published in six PLoS journals (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011). Anthony (2001) found that the lengths of titles within computer science literature varied widely, attributing it to different subdisciplines, claiming that “an adequate description depends more on the type of study or problem being investigated than the discipline itself” (p. 193).

Titles containing non-alphanumeric characters, such as colons, hyphens, dashes, and periods, indicating titles with a subtitle, or a multicomponent title, have been found to be common across the disciplines and generally associated with higher citation (Buter and van Raan, 2011). Specifically, the usage of colon has become more prevalent, although it differed across the fields (Lewison and Hartley, 2005). For example, a study of the medical literature found that 70% of highly cited articles included a colon (Jacques and Sebire, 2010), while a study of PLoS articles found that articles with colon had both fewer downloads and citations (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011).

Turning to title syntax, three types of article titles have been identified as most common: descriptive (or indicative), declarative (or informative), and titles posed as a question (or interrogatory) (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011; Wager et al., 2016). Descriptive (or indicative) titles describe the subject or topic of the article. Declarative (or informative) titles, in addition to describing the topic also state the main conclusion, or findings, of the study. Thus descriptive titles consist only of noun phrases, while declarative titles include action verbs. Rosner (1990), who calls such titles “the assertive sentence titles,” found that in biological sciences they first appeared in the 1970s and have been on the rise ever since, being especially prominent in molecular biology, making up to 45% of all the titles in Cell since 1986. Goodman (2010) also found a trend toward the usage of longer words and active verbs in medical literature over the period between 1970 and 2009. Usage of declarative titles has been somewhat controversial, especially in medical literature (Rosner, 1990; Aronson, 2010). While some journals ban the use of declarative titles (e.g., Microbiology), others (e.g., The Journal of Clinical Epidemiology) have been enforcing their usage (McGowan and Tugwell, 2005). While their usage has increased, the study that used randomized trial on doctors and senior medical and dental students found that declarative titles did not have significant effect on “readers’ perceptions of the conclusions” (Wager et al., 2016, p. 3).

Although the usage of question marks in titles has increased over time, they still account for a very small proportion of all the titles (Cook and Plourde, 2016). Anthony (2001) found interrogatory titles to be rare in computer science literature. Fox and Burns (2015) found that although the proportion of submitted articles to the journal Functional Ecology including questions in titles has decreased, the percentage of such articles among the published articles has increased over the 10-year period they had studied. Hudson (2016) found that the titles that include question marks were longer than other titles. The increase in the usage of questions in titles has been attributed to marketing purposes (Ball, 2009). The study of over 2,000 articles published in 6 PLoS journals found that articles with question titles were more often downloaded, but less frequently cited (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011).

Of all the title characteristics, the intellectual content of article titles, as expressed in terms or concepts, should be the one most closely related to their success and impact. Some studies tried to characterize the usage of concepts (terms) in titles. For example, a recent study of word frequency distribution in nanoscience/nanotechnology confirmed the power law distribution of the frequency of words used in the titles (Bartol and Stopar, 2015). Another study quantified lexical diversity in titles using title phrases rather than individual words (Milojević, 2015) and found that the fields expanded their cognitive extent over time even when normalized for increased productivity. Other studies, focused more closely on the sematic aspects of the words used in the titles. For example, Nagano (2009) analyzed word usage in four disciplines [history, sociology, economics (ECN), and education] and found history to be different from the others in terms of high usage of personal names, while sociology did not include a large number of unique terms. At the same time, medical literature titles that referred to a specific country (Jacques and Sebire, 2010), all the articles published by Italian researchers that included a country’s name in the title (Abramo et al., 2016), and ECL articles that referred to specific names of study organisms in the titles (Fox and Burns, 2015) fared poorly in terms of impact, or in the case of ECL even in terms of being accepted for publication. Although amusing titles might be perceived as a good strategy to boost attention, studies have shown that they either did not have any citation advantage (Sagi and Yechiam, 2008; Subotic and Mukherjee, 2014). By analyzing word frequency of over 800,000 article titles from 18 different Scopus categories (excluding social sciences, arts and humanities), Thelwall (2017) found that usage of obscure (not frequently used) words in titles is associated with below average citation. The analysis of the diversity of ECN words in titles based on the ECN dictionary showed cyclical patterns (of varying length—30 or 40 years) of word usage (Guo et al., 2015). A study of 420 titles in medical journals found that the largest number of titles included topics related words, followed by the methods, with most articles lacking information on research design, methods, and results (Goodman et al., 2001).

Contemporary science is becoming more collaborative. This trend has naturally led some researchers to examine whether the change in authorship had an effect on title construction (e.g., Hudson, 2016). And in general, studies have found some differences in titles depending on the number of authors. For example, coauthored papers by UK researchers published in 2014 use colons and question marks less, which was explained by a difficulty to reach consensus about their usage (Hudson, 2016). At the same time, the titles of coauthored papers were found to be longer, which was attributed to a need to accommodate all the authors’ views and needs (Hudson, 2016). Hudson also found that the titles of papers authored by a very large number of authors started resembling titles of papers authored by a small number of authors. This might be due to the fact that in, hyperauthorship scenario, only a very small number of authors were actually responsible for making decisions regarding the paper. Namely, Hudson (2016) has found that the single-authored papers have the shortest titles, with the title length increasing with the increase of number of authors on a paper up to 25–49 authors and then declining. However, the positive correlation between title length (measured as the number of substantive words per title) and number of authors on papers was found not to be universal—while common in sciences, it was not present in social sciences, and there was a negative correlation in humanities (Yitzhaki, 1994).

Some studies have looked into the nationality of authors and have found that it was not always decisive in the construction of titles. While Lewison and Hartley (2005) found that the nationality of authors did not affect title characteristics, Ball (2009) found national and regional differences in the use of question marks in article titles over a 40-year period he studied. These discrepancies might be described by the different disciplines studied, because researchers have found, analyzing the full text of articles, that disciplinary identity in medicine transcends national differences, while in ECN and linguistics the national writing tradition is more visible (Breivega et al., 2002; Dahl, 2004).

The aforementioned studies paint a complex and sometimes contradictory picture of the usage of titles in science. Few studies have analyzed multiple, diverse fields and multiple title characteristics with consistent methodology. Furthermore, most studies focused on possible correlations between titles and impact, paying less attention to the role that may be played by different characteristics of the authors. This study aims to disentangle the effects of time and discipline with those of the characteristics of the authors. We examine the characteristics of the titles and whether they have changed over a substantial period of time (half a century). We do so consistently for five diverse fields, in order to probe the usage of titles as a disciplinary identity building tool. The secondary objective is to establish whether different types of titles are used differently today by authors depending on their academic age, productivity, and collaboration levels, potentially important determinants that have not been explored before. Finally, we revisit the connection between title characteristics and impact.

We analyzed title characteristics in five scientific fields: astronomy (AST), mathematics (MAT), robotics (ROB), ECL, and ECN. These diverse fields have been chosen in order to allow us to capture a wide range of practices and discern whether certain practices are field-specific. AST is representative of a classical field with a range of knowledge production modes (small and large teams). MAT is different from other fields by being done individually or in small teams. ROB and ECL are representative of fields with more recent history and higher interdisciplinarity. Finally, ECN is representative of a field with a social component, unlike the other four.

The data consist of research articles published in up to 10 core journals in each of the five fields between 1961 and 2010 (from 1984 for ROB). The list of journal titles and the details of the selection criteria are given in Milojević (2012), which did not analyze the titles. Research articles are defined as publications classified as “article” or “conference paper.” In several cases in which the journal changed its title, we collected data corresponding to all predecessor titles. In total, the data set contained records for 213,756 articles. Table 1 shows breakdown by field. To study the practices with respect to authors’ characteristics, such as academic age, productivity, and number of collaborators and their relationship with title characteristics, we focused on the papers published in the most recent 5-year period (2006–2010). To explore correlations with impact, we obtained citations to these 2006–2010 articles received as of the end of 2013. All data were obtained from the Web of Science database.

We analyzed five title characteristics: length, proportion of subtitles, proportion of question titles, proportion of assertive titles, and cognitive extent over the period of 50 years (1961–2010) in five disciplines. We also analyzed the same characteristics against author characteristics, such as academic age, productivity and collaboration level, and paper citation for the most recent 5-year period (2006–2010).

Article titles are a rich source of data that can be used not only to elucidate the development of disciplines, fields, and research areas, identify trendy topics or subfields, but to help us better understand the processes of knowledge creation. Namely, a large number of studies have found titles to be the product of interaction between both individual and disciplinary identity building. While there were a number of studies that explored a particular aspect of titles for particular fields at particular times, mostly focusing on correlations with impact, the present study has simultaneously and consistently explored (a) a range of disciplines over long periods of time, (b) a suite of title characteristics, and (c) a number of variables related to author characteristics.

We found that belonging to some discipline is the strongest determinant for the average length of the titles and the occurrence of different forms of titles. This suggests that authors try to comply with the norms set in their fields. However, these norms are not fixed in time. Over the decades, the practices have changed. The increase in length over time has been well documented and should come as no surprise. As the field evolves, the studies become more detailed, and require more words to distinguish them with respect to previous studies, which were probably more general in scope. We have shown that this is the result of more detailed/specific description of article contents, and not the mere inclusion of subtitles.

The most drastic example of change in practices is the nearly simultaneous appearance, across different fields, of titles of interrogatory and declarative types in the mid-1990s, suggesting a common origin, perhaps influenced by the practices in prestigious multidisciplinary journals. We are in the epoch of increased overall assertiveness in title-giving practices.

Overall, we confirmed the importance of both the discipline and time period on the construction of titles. Interestingly, we found that not only the authors follow one another in their title choices (Nagano, 2015) within disciplines but that certain trends emerged in a whole range of disciplines at the same time. This is worth further study.

While individual groups of authors often did not differ in their practices regarding the use of titles, occasionally they did. Most notably, we find that authors with many collaborators tend to use more subtitles. Authors with many collaborators are often members of large teams, whose papers tend to be published in installments, which thus necessitate the use of subtitles. Also, the authors with a lot of collaborators tend to work on a smaller set of topics, as a group, than the ones who tend to work in smaller collaborations or alone. More productive authors tend to use interrogatory titles more often, suggesting that more productive authors tend to publish on more speculative topics. In some fields, older authors use shorter titles, perhaps reflecting the fact that these authors have started their careers when titles used to be shorter.

It would be interesting to further explore whether these differences are truly due to different author characteristics or due to authors with certain characteristics being more prevalent in particular subfields which may have differing practices.

A topic that has received much interest is whether the titles of articles with greater impact tend to have special characteristics. We find that the prevalence of what may be considered more aggressive or assertive titles (the ones posed as questions or which state the result) is actually similar among the articles having vastly diverse impacts (from zero to hundreds of citations), suggesting that the use of such strategies does not confer any citation benefit. More highly cited papers do have longer titles and more often contain subtitles in AST and ECL, but this does not necessarily imply a causal connection. Longer titles are the characteristic of articles produced by larger teams, which tend to be cited more. Furthermore, no such correlation is seen in MAT, ECN, and ROB. In any case, it would be interesting to see whether in instances when certain title characteristics were correlated with impact, such a correlation was due to either paper or title characteristics, as opposed to the a fact that certain subfields or modes of doing science may have particular title preferences or even constraints, and that at the same time these subfields are moving the research front, therefore accruing more citations quicker.

Interesting, in all the fields, we find that the higher the impact, the narrower the diversity of title concepts. This means that while the papers covering all the topics can do poorly, a more restricted set of topics does very well in terms of citations. This may be the effect of very active subfields or a small number of “hot” topics pushing the research frontier.

The work uses Web of Science data by Thomson Reuters provided by the Network Science Institute and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University.

SM designed the study, performed the analyses, and wrote the manuscript.

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.