The evolution of research article titles: the case of Journal of Pragmatics 1978–2018

• DOI: 10.1007/s11192-019-03244-3
• Publication Date: 2019-10-03T08:02:46Z
• Authors: Zhijun LI; Jinfen XU
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0509 other social sciences

Previous studies seldom investigated the evolution of research article titles in pragmatics. Based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of 650 research article titles, this study depicts the evolutionary trends of research article titles published in the Journal of Pragmatics regarding their length, lexical density, structural constructions and semantic content since the establishment of the journal in 1977. Our findings identified a trend towards longer titles with higher lexical density, an increasing preference for compound constructions over nominal-group and full sentence constructions, and a more prevalent presentation of information about research method/design in addition to the topic in titles over the past four decades. These findings suggest that research article titles published in the journal appear to be diachronically more informative.