Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article

The great importance of titles being highly informative is almost unanimously accepted in literature, assuming that the more informative titles are, the more effectively they serve their functions. The most common measure of title “informativeness” has been the number of “significant” (i.e., non-trivial) words included in it, and one of the factors which might be associated with it is the length of the paper, measured by its number of pages. The present study attempted to test, in a large group of journals from different areas and over six decades, the hypothesis that a paper with more pages will have more “significant” words in its title. Large samples of original research papers were drawn from each decade year of twenty-four leading journals selected from the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. For each paper, the number of “significant” words in the title was correlated with the number of pages. Findings indicate a difference between the scientific journals on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities journals on the other. A moderate positive correlation was found in most scientific journals for many periods. In the social sciences journals, and to a greater extent, in the humanities journals, a significant positive correlation was limited to only a few periods, while the rest showed a very low correlation, or even a negative one. The different findings for the sciences are perhaps attributable to their unique inherent features. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Relation of title length of journal articles to number of authors

The great importance of titles being highly informative is almost unanimously accepted in literature, assuming that the more informative titles are, the more effectively they serve their functions. The most common measure of title informativeness has been the number of substantive words included in it, and one of the factors which might be associated with it is the number of authors. The present study attempted to test, in a large group of journals fromdifferent areas, and over six decades, the hypothesis that a paper signed by a larger number of authors will have more substantive words in its title. Large samples of original research papers were drawn from each decade year of fourteen leading journals. For each paper, the number of substantive words in the title was correlated with the number of authors. Findings indicate a difference between the scientific journals on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities journals on the other. A moderate positive correlation was found in most scientific journals (excluding mathematics) for many periods. In the social sciences journals, and to a greater extent, in the humanities journals, a significant positive correlation was limited to only a few periods, while the rest showed a very low correlation, or even a negative correlation. The different findings for the sciences may be somehow associated with their higher rate of multiple authorship.Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference on Bibliometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics in Berlin (Germany), September 11–15, 1993.     

Garfield’s demon and “surprising” or “unexpected” results in science

The relative occurrence of the words “surprising” and “unexpected” in the titles of scientific papers was 11 times more common in 2001–2005 than in 1900–1955. However, papers which had titles containing one of these words did not receive enhanced numbers of citations. Both words (and also adjectives “unusual” and “unfortunately”) are used significantly more frequently in science than in social sciences and humanities. The distribution of the statements of surprise is not random in scientific literature (chemistry journals ranked highest in the number of papers claiming “surprising” or “unexpected” results) and may reflect the level of maturity of a discipline.     

Complex Systems in Natural Science and Humanities

In this paper specifics of the research subject within the natural sciences and humanities are supposed to be well-known. These specifics set limits to communication between scholars and natural scientists. In particular this leads to critical situations in cases if both participants have to collaborate within a common interdisciplinary research work. The modern conception of complex system as subject of investigation for both natural sciences and humanities have in this context an integrating function. The term ‘complex system’ is now recognized as a transdisciplinary matter of research. Despite of the well-known differences between two fields of modern science one can find on this condition a number of mechanisms which are generating also common properties of them. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A diachronic comparative study of research article titles in linguistics and literature journals

By investigating a total number of 1364 article titles extracted from seven SSCI-indexed linguistics journals and seven A&HCI-indexed literature journals between 1980 and 2018, this study attempts to present the prominent form features and content attributes of the titles and their diachronic variations, as well as the similarities or differences between the two disciplines regarding title features. Results show that article titles in both subject domains demonstrate consistency in the long-range trend of title length and informativity, enjoying a steady and linear growth in length and an increase with fluctuations in informativity. Nominal and compound structures are both frequently adopted in linguistics and literature journals, but the proportion of compound constructions has always been higher than that of nominal ones in literature journals over the past 39 years. Titles containing topical information enjoy the highest percentage from the 1980s to the 2010s in both linguistics and literature journals. However, in the recent decade, content information provided by linguistic article titles tends to be more diversified, presenting not only research topics, but also results, dataset and methods of the study. No significant variations between the two disciplines have been found in lexical diversity, both of which experienced an overall downward trend.

     

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.

     

Scholarly publishing in social sciences and humanities, associated probabilities of belonging and its spectrum: a quantitative approach for the Spanish case

In this study, differences between Spanish social sciences and humanities journals are examined using a quantitative approach. Firstly, using a set of 144 psychology journals and 69 philosophy journals, statistically significant differences have been identified in 11 characteristics/indicators. Secondly, a logistic regression was carried out on the dichotomous response variable “belonging to the social sciences” or “belonging to the humanities”, on 777 Spanish social sciences journals, 563 humanities journals that have been previously classified and 17 existing predictor variables. The regression model reached an overall correct classification of 78.8 %. The explanatory variables considered in the model are analyzed and interpreted taking into account the change in the odds ratio and the indication of their contribution to the correct classification rate in the two response values. Finally the average associated probability of belonging to the social sciences group is calculated for each discipline and reflected in a spectrum of the probability of belonging to the social sciences or the humanities.     

A quantitative analysis of Arctic related articles in the humanities and social sciences appearing in the world core journals

To demonstrate the importance of Arctic studies in the humanities and social sciences, we collected data from the SSCI and A&HCI covering a period of over 100 years and focused on the number of papers published each year, the major journals, types of documents, major languages represented, authors and their countries publishing the most articles, author’s affiliations, collaboration and the major research subjects covered. The results indicate that worldwide scholars had never been absent in this field for more than one century. Countries near the Arctic, particularly in North America and the Nordic, show the most interest and have the most research results. Universities and colleges are the most important research institutions in this field. North America is the area that has conducted the largest amount of research, while some Western European countries such as Germany and France, performed with great enthusiasm research in relation with North Pole expeditions. Arctic research in the humanities and social sciences has gradually expanded from the historical, archaeological, and anthropological fields to the realm of political, social, educational sciences including international relations, music, art, etc.     

Bibliometric monitoring of research performance in the Social Sciences and the Humanities: A Review

Summary This paper addresses research performance monitoring of the social sciences and the humanities using citation analysis. Main differences in publication and citation behavior between the (basic) sciences and the social sciences and humanities are outlined. Limitations of the (S)SCI and A&HCI for monitoring research performance are considered. For research performance monitoring in many social sciences and humanities, the methods used in science need to be extended. A broader range of both publications (including non-ISI journals and monographs) and citation indicators (including non-ISI reference citation values) is needed. Three options for bibliometric monitoring are discussed.     

Geschlechterforschung ist Wissenschaftsforschung – Wissenschaftsforschung ist Geschlechterforschung

The articles collected in this number all originate from a section of the 2004 annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik.The section was organized by the Berlin Feminist Science Studies Workgroup (BFSSW) at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. The contributions are dedicated to recent accounts and research topics in a field constituted by the intersection between 20th century (life) sciences and gender studies.They view modern life sciences as situated in hybrid fields of theory and practice, public and scientific discourse, of experimental procedures and practices of control. Methodological approaches range from Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, Foucault’s regulatory power and governmentality, Butler’s method of analyzing performativity and Haraway’s situated knowledge. They focus on dispositifs of research and regulation, visualizing procedures in the human sciences, and the emergence of new objects of biopolitics. One contribution focuses on the ‘politics of emotions’ and the paradoxical effects of laughter in ‘sexed’ and ‘gendered’ discourses and explores the productivity of humor for a gender-sensitive way of ‘doing history’. This introduction deals with recent developments in – mainly German – gender studies during the last two decades under the triple perspective of women in science, science of gender and gender in science.

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Geschlechterforschung ist Wissenschaftsforschung – Wissenschaftsforschung ist Geschlechterforschung Einführung in den Themenschwerpunkt “Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte”

     

Investigating disciplinary differences in the relationships between citations and downloads

Several studies have examined the relationships between citation and download data. Some have also analyzed disciplinary differences in the relationships by comparing a few subject areas or a few journals. To gain a deeper understanding of the disciplinary differences, we carried out a comprehensive study investigating the issue in five disciplines of science, engineering, medicine, social sciences, and humanities. We used a systematic method to select fields and journals ensuring a very broad spectrum and balanced representation of various academic fields. A total of 69 fields and 150 journals were included. We collected citation and download data for these journals from China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database, the largest Chinese academic journal database in the world. We manually filtered out non-research papers such as book reviews and editorials. We analyzed the relationships both at the journal and the paper level. The study found that social sciences and humanities are different from science, engineering, and medicine and that the pattern of differences are consistent across all measures studied. Social sciences and humanities have higher correlations between citations and downloads, higher correlations between downloads per paper and Journal Impact Factor, and higher download-to-citation ratios. The disciplinary differences mean that the accuracy or utility of download data in measuring the impact are higher in social sciences and humanities and that download data in those disciplines reflect or measure a broader impact, much more than the impact in citing authors.     

The classification of biomedical journals by research level

A new method of classification of biomedical research journals by research level (RL) into clinical or basic, or somewhere in between, is described that updates the system developed by CHI Research Inc. nearly 30 years ago. It is based on counting articles that have one of about 100 “clinical” title words, or one of a similar number of “basic” title words, or both. It allows over 3000 journals in the Science Citation Index (or other databases) to be classified rapidly and transparently, for changes in their research level with time, and for many individual papers in “mixed” journals to be categorised as clinical or basic. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The ‘language preference’ in sociology: Measures of ‘language self-citation’, ‘relative own-language preference indicator’, and ‘mutual use of languages’

Although between one-third to one-half of world social sciences research literature is published in languages other than English, studies show very scant use of it by American and English scholars. Almost all studies, however, were conducted from the Anglo-Saxon perspective, limiting the scope of the study to English-published sources or English-speaking scientists and research workers. The present study aimed at assessing the scope of the language preference in a social sciences field, not only among American and British scholars, but among German and French ones as well, using the technique of citation analysis. Samples including mostly 50–60 original research articles were drawn from the 1985–1994 volumes of nine leading sociology journals published in the US, UK, Germany and France and the references appended to each were scrutinized in order to determine the frequency distribution of the languages cited in each periodical. Findings clearly showed a strong preference of writers to cite material in their own language. However, the extent of this bias differed from journal to journal. The American and British writers rank first, with close to 99% of their references being in English. German scholars rank next, preferring German sources in 75% of the cases, and French scholars quote French sources in only 66% of their references. In order to calculate the new refined measure of ‘relative own-language preference’ (ROLP) indicator, the proportions of ‘language self-citation’ were related to the estimated proportions of these languages in the existing body of sociology research. This measure reveals that German sociologists have the strongest bias towards their mother-tongue, their ratio of references in German exceeding almost 12 to 28 times the expected figure according to the German language share in sociology research. Next come French sociologists (8 to 14 times) while American and British ones display the lowest own-language bias, only slightly higher than expected. Further analysis of the foreign languages preference of each group, according to a ‘mutual-use’ matrix, shows a relative low use of German and French sources by British-American sociologists.     

Identifying economics’ place amongst academic disciplines: a science or a social science?

Different academic disciplines exhibit different styles, including styles in journal titles. Using data from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK we are able to identify the stylistic trends of different disciplines using 155,552 journal titles across all disciplines. Cluster analysis is then used to group the different disciplines together. The resulting identification fits the social sciences, the sciences and the arts and humanities reasonably well. Economics overall, fits best with philosophy, but the linkage is weak. When we divided economics into papers published in theory, econometrics and the remaining journals, the first two link with mathematics and computer science, particularly econometrics, and thence the sciences. The rest of economics then links with business and thence the social sciences.     

The mathematical review system: does reviewer status play a role in the citation process?

This paper revisits an aspect of citation theory (i.e., citer motivation) with respect to the Mathematical Review system and the reviewer’s role in mathematics. We focus on a set of journal articles (369) published in Singularity Theory (1974–2003), the mathematicians who wrote editorial reviews for these articles, and the number of citations each reviewed article received within a 5 year period. Our research hypothesis is that the cognitive authority of a high status reviewer plays a positive role in how well a new article is received and cited by others. Bibliometric evidence points to the contrary: Singularity Theorists of lower status (junior researchers) have reviewed slightly more well-cited articles (2–5 citations, excluding author self-citations) than their higher status counterparts (senior researchers). One explanation for this result is that lower status researchers may have been asked to review ‘trendy’ or more accessible parts of mathematics, which are easier to use and cite. We offer further explanations and discuss a number of implications for a theory of citation in mathematics. This research opens the door for comparisons to other editorial review systems, such as book reviews written in the social sciences or humanities.     

Trends in research foci in life science fields over the last 30 years monitored by emerging topics

We report here a simple method to identify the ‘emerging topics’ in life sciences. First, the keywords selected from MeSH terms on PubMed by filtering the terms based on their increment rate of the appearance, and, then, were sorted into groups dealing with the same topics by ‘co-word’ analysis. These topics were defined as ‘emerging topics’. The survey of the emerging keywords with high increment rates of appearance between 1972 to 2006 showed that emerging topics changed dramatically year by year, and that the major shift of the topics occurred in the late 90s; the topics that cover technical and conceptual aspects in molecular biology to the more systematic ‘-omics’-related and nanoscience-related aspects. We further investigated trends in emerging topics within various sub-fields in the life sciences.     

Comprehensive bibliographic coverage of the social sciences and humanities in a citation index: an empirical analysis of the potential

A well-designed and comprehensive citation index for the social sciences and humanities has many potential uses, but has yet to be realised. Significant parts of the scholarly production in these areas are not published in international journals, but in national scholarly journals, in book chapters or in monographs. The potential for covering these literatures more comprehensively can now be investigated empirically using a complete publication output data set from the higher education sector of an entire country (Norway). We find that while the international journals in the social sciences and humanities are rather small and more dispersed in specialties, representing a large but not unlimited number of outlets, the domestic journal publishing, as well as book publishing on both the international and domestic levels, show a concentration of many publications in few publication channels. These findings are promising for a more comprehensive coverage of the social sciences and humanities.     

Africa’s contribution to the worldwide research literature: New analytical perspectives,trends, and performance indicators

This paper examines general characteristics of African science from a quantitative ‘scientometric’ perspective. More specifically, that of research outputs of Africa-based authors published in the scientific literature during the years 1980–2004, either within the international journals representing ‘mainstream’ science, or within national and regional journals reflecting ‘indigenous science’. As for the international journals, the findings derived from Thomson Scientific’s Citation Indexes show that while Africa’s share in worldwide science has steadily declined, the share of international co-publications has increased very significantly, whereas low levels of international citation impact persist. A case study of South African journals reveals the existence of several journals that are not processed for these international databases but nonetheless show a distinctive citation impact on international research communities.     

Comparative analysis of journals on social sciences and humanities in Ukraine and the world

Summary This article analyses the changes in development of journals on social sciences and humanities in Ukraine and shows the results of the comparative analysis of journals on social sciences and humanities in Ukraine, and journals in the world included in relevant databases of the US Institute for Scientific Information (Philadelphia).