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Are titles of chemical papers becoming more informative?

Author

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  • Jacques J. Tocatlian

Abstract

The efficiency of key‐word‐in‐context (KWIC) permuted‐title indexes and their numerous variations is highly dependent upon authors' choices of titles for their papers. Titles are important not only in commercial services, such as Chemical Titles, BASIC, Current Contents, and CA Condensates, but also in scanning primary journals, and in traditional library services, such as bibliographies. It is generally believed and often stated that titles of chemical papers are becoming more informative as authors become increasingly aware of the importance of titles as “carriers” of information. The present study was undertaken to test whether (1) titles of chemical papers are becoming more informative and (2) whether uninformative titles of chemical papers are being eliminated since the advent of the KWIC index in 1958. The first hypothesis was tested by comparing titles published in 1948, 1958, and 1968 by the following criteria: (1) a count of substantive words in the title; (2) a count of all word matches between title and abstract, with and without the use of a thesaurus; and (3) a count of word matches between title and 10 leading substantive words selected from the abstract, with and without the use of a thesaurus. The second hypothesis was tested by comparing a count of short titles (with 3 or less substantive words) published in 1948, 1958, and 1968. Results confirm that uninformative titles of chemical papers are being eliminated and that informative titles are becoming more informative since the advent of the KWIC index.

Suggested Citation

  • Jacques J. Tocatlian, 1970. "Are titles of chemical papers becoming more informative?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 21(5), pages 345-350, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:21:y:1970:i:5:p:345-350
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.4630210506
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    Cited by:

    1. Moshe Yitzhaki, 2002. "Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 54(3), pages 435-447, July.
    2. Shaoliang Xie, 2020. "English Research Article Titles: Cultural and Disciplinary Perspectives," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(2), pages 21582440209, June.
    3. Hamid R. Jamali & Mahsa Nikzad, 2011. "Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 88(2), pages 653-661, August.
    4. Gianna Kexin Jiang & Yajun Jiang, 2023. "More diversity, more complexity, but more flexibility: research article titles in TESOL Quarterly, 1967–2022," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 128(7), pages 3959-3980, July.
    5. Xuechun Xiang & Jing Li, 2020. "A diachronic comparative study of research article titles in linguistics and literature journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(2), pages 847-866, February.

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