What&;#39;s in a title? Numbers of words and the presence of colons

Summary Much has been written about titles in scientific journal articles but little research has been carried out. We aimed to assess in two studies how factors like the length of a title and its structure might vary in different scientific fields, and whether or not these features have changed over time. Statistical analyses were made of 216,500 UK papers from science journals, and of 133,200 international oncology papers. Factors examined included title length, the use of colons in the titles, and the number of authors. All of these factors increased over time for both sets of papers, although there were some disciplinary differences in the findings. In both studies, titles with colons occurred more frequently with single than with multiple authors except when the numbers of co-authors were large. Certain features of titles can be related to different disciplines, different journals, the numbers of authors and their nationalities.     

The impact of internet resources on scholarly communication: A citation analysis

The quality and credibility of Internet resources has been a concern in scholarly communication. This paper reports a quantitative analysis of the use of Internet resources in journal articles and addresses the concerns for the use of Internet resources scholarly journals articles. We collected the references listed in 35,698 articles from 14 journals published during 1996 to 2005, which resulted in 1,000,724 citations. The citation data was divided into two groups: traditional citations and Web citations, and examined based on frequencies of occurrences by domain and type of Web citation sources. The findings included: (1) The number of Web citations in the journals investigated had been increasing steadily, though the quantity was too small to draw an inclusive conclusion on the data about their impact on scientific research; (2) A great disparity existed among different disciplines in terms of using information on the Web. Applied disciplines and interdisciplinary sciences tended to cite more information on the Web, while classical and experimental disciplines cited little of Web information; (3) The frequency of citations was related to the reputation of the author or the institution issuing the information, and not to the domain or webpage types; and (4) The researchers seemed to lack confidence in Internet resources, and Web information was not as frequently cited as reported in some publications before. The paper also discusses the need for developing a guideline system to evaluate Web resources regarding their authority and quality that lies in the core of credibility of Web information.     

Impact of studies published in the international literature by scientists at the National University of Mexico

A total of 2192 articles published in the international literature with UNAM (National University of Mexico) first author affiliation and registered by the CICH (Centro de Iformación Científica y Humanística) BIBLAT database from 1978-mid-1987 were included in our analysis. Distribution of articles according to the main subject areas of the 692 different journal titles used was as follows: Physics 24.1%, Medicine 19.7%, Biology 19.4%, Chemistry 9.7%, Engineering 8.9%, Exact Sciences 7.3%, Geosciences 4.7%, Psychology 0.96%, Agrosciences 0.27%. Thirty-seven percent of articles were published in journals with a known impact factor for 1987 of 1, 46.1% (920) in journals within the range of >1–3 average citations/article and only 16.4% (327) in those titles with a factor >3. Fifty-four percent (1082) of studies appeared in journals whose total citation count for 1987 was 5000; 7.3% (146) in journals cited >50,000 times in that same year. UNAM scientists therefore as a group tend to publish in journals whose articles are not frequently cited in subsequent publications thus limiting their impact and visibility in the international scientific literature.Paper presented at the International Conference on Science Indicators for Developing Countries, Paris, 15–19 October, 1990.     

Is the science citation index US-biased?

The Western European science policy establishment often claims that US articles are more frequently cited than articles of the European Union's scientists because they are published in journals with a large number of US publications and that these journals are forming the ‘core’ of the SCI. For the disciplines covered by the SCI, no significant correlation has been found between the ratio of the average number of citations per publication for publications with at least one EU address and at least one US address, respectively, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the ratio of the corresponding number of publications per journal.     

Does the human capital of teams of natural science authors predict citation frequency?

This study examines the relationship between citation frequency and the human capital of teams of authors. Analysis of a random sample of articles published in top natural science journals shows that articles co-authored by teams including frequently cited scholars and teams whose members have diverse disciplinary backgrounds have greater citation frequency. The institutional prestige, the percentage of team members at U. S. institutions and the variety of disciplines represented by team member backgrounds do not influence citation frequency. The study introduces a method for evaluating the extent of multidisciplinarity that accounts for the relatedness of disciplines or authors.     

China’s research in chemical engineering journals in Science Citation Index Expanded: a bibliometric analysis

This study was designed to evaluate China’s scientific output of chemical engineering in Science Citation Index Expanded in the Web of Science from 1992 to 2011. The document type, language, trend and collaboration patterns were analyzed, as well as the output of different journals. Distributions of article titles and abstracts, author keywords, KeyWords Plus of different periods, and the most cited articles were studied to figure out the research focuses and trends. Chinese Journal of Catalysis, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, and Chinese Journal of Chemical Engineering published most of Chinese articles in the area of chemical engineering. The Chemical Engineering Department of Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Tianjin University, and East China University of Science and Technology were the top four institutions that published most articles in China. This study showed that adsorption, photocatalysis and synthesis have been the hot points of research in the past two decades, while ionic liquid tends to be the new area of special interest in future. Pseudo-second order model for sorption processes is getting more and more popular with great influence since its publication. In addition, the ratio of institutional independent articles: nationally collaborative articles: internationally collaborative articles has been developed to compare different institutions’ publication characteristics.     

Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005

The titles of scientific articles have a special significance. We examined nearly 20 million scientific articles and recorded the development of articles with a question mark at the end of their titles over the last 40 years. Our study was confined to the disciplines of physics, life sciences and medicine, where we found a significant increase from 50% to more than 200% in the number of articles with question-mark titles. We looked at the principle functions and structure of the titles of scientific papers, and we assume that marketing aspects are one of the decisive factors behind the growing usage of question-mark titles in scientific articles.     

Citedness and uncitedness of cancer articles

There is a rapid growth of cancer literature. Thousands of papers are being regularly published every year not only in speciality journals, but also in journals of other disciplines. Citation studies are nowadays considered a major basis of science indicators for ascertaining the importance of a scientific journal and that of the published articles on a particular subject. In oncological research the journalCancer is considered as one of the top most journals and is universally well known for its high standard and excellence. In this paper an attempt has been made to find out the importance of all the articles published in it for a particular year. Side by side bibliometric analysis was made to ascertain various other aspects like time lag between publication and first citation of articles, average citation time, subject scattering and identification of most important journals in the field etc. It is believed that this study would be of help to the working oncologists, librarians and information scientists to assess the importance of articles published in a top ranking journal of cancer and also that of different journals publishing oncological research results.     

Exploring the bibliometric and semantic nature of negative results

Negative results are not popular to disseminate. However, their publication would help to save resources and foster scientific communication. This study analysed the bibliometric and semantic nature of negative results publications. The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (JNRBM) was used as a role model. Its complete articles from 2002–2009 were extracted from SCOPUS and supplemented by related records. Complementary negative results records were retrieved from Web of Science in “Biochemistry” and “Telecommunications”. Applied bibliometrics comprised of co-author and co-affiliation analysis and a citation impact profile. Bibliometrics showed that authorship is widely spread. A specific community for the publication of negative results in devoted literature is non-existent. Neither co-author nor co-affiliation analysis indicated strong interconnectivities. JNRBM articles are cited by a broad spectrum of journals rather than by specific titles. Devoted negative results journals like JNRBM have a rather low impact measured by the number of received citations. On the other hand, only one-third of the publications remain uncited, corroborating their importance for the scientific community. The semantic analysis relies on negative expressions manually identified in JNRBM article titles and abstracts and extracted to syntactic patterns. By using a Natural Language Processing tool these patterns are then employed to detect their occurrences in the multidisciplinary bibliographical database PASCAL. The translation of manually identified negation patterns to syntactic patterns and their application to multidisciplinary bibliographic databases (PASCAL, Web of Science) proved to be a successful method to retrieve even hidden negative results. There is proof that negative results are not only restricted to the biomedical domain. Interestingly a high percentage of the so far identified negative results papers were funded and therefore needed to be published. Thus policies that explicitly encourage or even mandate the publication of negative results could probably bring about a shift in the current scientific communication behaviour.     

Citation patterns of Korean physicists and mechanical engineers: Differences by type of publication source and type of authorship

By comparing the citation patterns of Korean researchers in physics and mechanical engineering, this study identifies the extent to which type of publication source (Korean non-SCI, Korean SCI, and international SCI) and type of authorship (purely Korean authors, Korean-foreign co-authors, and foreign-Korean co-authors) influence the choice of sources cited by Korean scientists. Koreans publishing physics or mechanical engineering papers in international SCI journals are more likely to cite articles published in journals of the science mainstream countries (the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, and Germany) than articles published in national journals, while Koreans publishing in Korean journals tend to cite articles published in national journals. In terms of authorship, articles published in mainstream journals are more highly cited by internationally co-authored papers than Korean-authored papers in both disciplines. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A scientometric study of global electric vehicle research

A scientometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate the status and trends of electric vehicle papers published between 1993 and 2012 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Web of Science. Electric vehicle was used as a keyword to search parts of titles, abstracts, or keywords. Publication trends were analyzed by the retrieved results in publication outputs, subject categories and publication pattern, international productivity. The document co-citation analysis was done in CitespaceII to find out the intellectual base and research fronts of electric vehicle. The articles about electric vehicle increased fast in the last 20 years. 11 document types were found in all electric vehicle-related papers and proceedings paper was the most frequently used document type. Language analysis showed that English was the most dominating language. “Engineering electrical electronic”, “Energy fuels” and “Transportation science technology” were the top three most popular subject categories. Journal of Power Sources, IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Transaction on Industrial Electronics were the representative journals in the field of electric vehicle. The USA, China and Japan were the most productive countries. University of Michigan, Harbin Institute of Technology and Ohio State University were the most productive countries. Vehicle-to-grid technology, control strategy, combination of power management and traffic information from GPS, plug-in electric vehicle, architectures and modeling, battery and policy about electric vehicle are the research fronts of electric vehicle.     

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 bibliometric analysis and comparison on three information science journals: JASIST,IPM, JOD, 1998–2008

Employing a citation analysis, this study explored and compared the bibliometric characteristics and the subject relationship with other disciplines of and among the three leading information science journals, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), Information Processing and Management and Journal of Documentation. The citation data were drawn from references of each article of the three journals during 1998 and 2008. The Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, Library of Congress Subject Heading, retrieved from the WorldCat, and LISA database were used to identify the main class, subclass and subject of cited journals and books. Quantitative results on the number of JASIST, IPM and JOD literature references, average number of references cited per paper, document type of cited literature and the journal self-citation rate are reported. Moreover, the highly cited journals and books, the main classes and subclasses of cited journals and books in papers of the three journals, the highly cited subjects in journals and books of library and information science were identified and analyzed. Comparison on the characteristics of cited journals and books confirmed that all the three journals under study are information science oriented, except JOD which is library science orientation. JASIST and IPM are very much in common and diffuse to other disciplines more deeply than JOD.     

Environmental sciences research in northern Australia, 2000–2011: a bibliometric analysis within the context of a national research assessment exercise

This paper reports on a bibliometric analysis of environmental sciences research in northern Australia between 2000 and 2011. It draws on publications data for Charles Darwin University (CDU) and James Cook University (JCU) researchers to present a bibliometric profile of the journals in which they publish, the citations to their research outputs, and the key research topics discussed in the publications. Framing this analysis, the study explored the relationship between the two universities’ publications and their ‘fit’ with the environmental sciences field as defined by the Australian research assessment model, Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). The Scopus database retrieved more records than Web of Science, although only minor differences were seen in the journals in which researchers published most frequently and the most highly cited articles. Strong growth in publications is evident in the 12 year period, but the journals in which the researchers publish most frequently differ from the journals in which the most highly cited articles are published. Many of the articles by CDU and JCU affiliated researchers are published in journals outside of the environmental sciences category as defined by Scopus and Web of Science categories and the ERA, however, the research conducted at each university aligns closely with that institution’s research priorities.     

More reprint requests, more citations?

Reprint requests are commonly used to obtain a copy of an article. This study aims to correlate the number of reprint requests from a 10-year-sample of articles with the number of citations. The database contained 28 articles published in over a 10-year-period (1992-2001). For each separate article the number of citations and and the number of reprint requests were retrieved. In total 303 reprint requests were analysed. Reviews (median 9, range 1 to 95) and original articles (median 8, range 1-36) attracted most reprint requests. There was an excellent correlation between the number of requests and citations to article (two-tailed non-parametric Spearman rank test r = 0.55; 95% confidence interval 0.18-0.78, P < 0.005). Articles that received most reprint requests are cited more often. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

On the impact of Gold Open Access journals

Gold Open Access (=Open Access publishing) is for many the preferred route to achieve unrestricted and immediate access to research output. However, true Gold Open Access journals are still outnumbered by traditional journals. Moreover availability of Gold OA journals differs from discipline to discipline and often leaves scientists concerned about the impact of these existent titles. This study identified the current set of Gold Open Access journals featuring a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) by means of Ulrichsweb, Directory of Open Access Journals and Journal Citation Reports (JCR). The results were analyzed regarding disciplines, countries, quartiles of the JIF distribution in JCR and publishers. Furthermore the temporal impact evolution was studied for a Top 50 titles list (according to JIF) by means of Journal Impact Factor, SJR and SNIP in the time interval 2000–2010. The identified top Gold Open Access journals proved to be well-established and their impact is generally increasing for all the analyzed indicators. The majority of JCR-indexed OA journals can be assigned to Life Sciences and Medicine. The success-rate for JCR inclusion differs from country to country and is often inversely proportional to the number of national OA journal titles. Compiling a list of JCR-indexed OA journals is a cumbersome task that can only be achieved with non-Thomson Reuters data sources. A corresponding automated feature to produce current lists “on the fly” would be desirable in JCR in order to conveniently track the impact evolution of Gold OA journals.     

Changing patterns of communication among scientists in an era of “telescience”

In a work environment filled with computers, telephones, fax machines, and other telecommunications equipment, scientists can engage in a new way of conducting their research: telescience. Telescience, a term that originated at NASA, is defined as the existence of geographically dispersed, intensely communicative research groups and collaborators, electronic journals, and teleconferences. The concept seems to be a natural outgrowth of the development of “big science” in the postwar era—only now, instead of an increase in the number of journal articles or organized scientific meetings, there is an increase in the amount of interpersonal interaction facilitated by the new electronic infrastructure. It is not yet clear that telescience will become the mode in most scholarly disciplines, for a number of economic and cultural reasons. However, where it does appear, it may emerge at different rates in different disciplines as the nature and needs of those specialties encourage the differential adoption of the various telecommunications technologies. In this article, the communication processes and structures that are typical of scientific activity are summarized according to a three-stage communication cycle. In addition, the factors that affect scientists' choices of both conventional and newer telecommunication channels are discussed, as well as the barriers that may prevent them from adopting or using such channels. Finally, the potential behavioral, social, and policy implications of the growth of telescience are reviewed, especially in the social context of the contemporary research university.     

Does Urquhart’s Law hold for consortial use of electronic journals?

This paper tests the validity of Urquhart’s Law (“the inter-library loan demand for a periodical is as a rule a measure of its total use”). It compares the use of print journals at the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM) with the consortial use of the same journals in their electronic form by the individual libraries making up the Consortium of Turkish University Libraries (ANKOS). It also compares the on-site use of electronic journals at ULAKBIM with their consortial use at ANKOS. About 700 thousand document delivery, in-house and on-site use data and close to 28 million consortial use data representing seven years’ worth of downloads of full-text journal articles were used. Findings validate Urquhart’s Law in that a positive correlation was observed between the use of print journals at ULAKBIM and the consortial use of their electronic copies at ANKOS. The on-site and consortial use of electronic journals was also highly correlated. Both print and electronic journals that were used most often at ULAKBIM tend to get used heavily by the member libraries of ANKOS consortium, too. Findings can be used in developing consortial collection management policies and negotiate better consortial licence agreements.     

Titles in English-medium Astrophysics research articles

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.