Abstract
In this study we analyse a corpus of 300 randomly selected research paper titles written in English and published between 1998 and 2012 in the most prestigious journals in the field of Astrophysics, an under-researched discipline from a linguistic standpoint. We specifically address issues related to the evolution of titles, their length, their lexical density, their type distribution and their semantic content. Our findings reveal a trend towards relatively long titles with a high lexical density, a preference for nominal and simple titles over verbal and compound ones, a very low occurrence of question constructions, and a prevalence of purpose and results over methods as key research concepts expressed in titles. We compare our findings with the results of previous studies on titles in other scientific disciplines and provide explanations for the differences and similarities observed.
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Notes
All the mentioned impact factors refer to the year 2012 (the Information was found in each journal home page). It is worth saying that although impact factors are a somewhat dubious measure, they serve a useful purpose for grouping papers together.
An acronym is a string of letters with a syllabic structure that is usually pronounced as a word and not letter-by-letter as in the case of abbreviations. For example, the word “quasar” stands for “quasi-stellar radio source”.
The prevalence of the definite article was already observed by Fortanet et al. (1998) in research paper titles in Applied Linguistics, Business and Economy.
Some of these very popular science magazines are, for example, Scientific American, Popular Science and Science Daily (English), La Recherche (French), or Investigación y Ciencia (Spanish version of Scientific American), Muy Interesante and Toda Ciencia (Spanish).
The –ing form can also have other nominal and adjectival functions but their detailed analysis is outside the scope of this paper.
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The authors wish to thank the suggestions provided by the anonymous reviewers that greatly improved the manuscript.
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Méndez, D.I., Ángeles Alcaraz, M. & Salager-Meyer, F. Titles in English-medium Astrophysics research articles. Scientometrics 98, 2331–2351 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1174-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1174-6