38 research outputs found
Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science
© 2020 The Author. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence.
The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00078Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for their publications,
but would this be mistaken in some fields? Whilst poetic titles are known to be common in
medicine, it is not clear whether the practice is widespread elsewhere. This article
investigates the prevalence of poetic expressions in journal article titles 1996-2019 in 3.3
million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually
checking all phrases with at least 5 words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149 stock
phrases, idioms, sayings, literary allusions, film names and song titles or lyrics. The
expressions found are most common in the social sciences and the humanities. They are also
relatively common in medicine, but almost absent from engineering and the natural and
formal sciences. The differences may reflect the less hierarchical and more varied nature of
the social sciences and humanities, where interesting titles may attract an audience. In
engineering, natural science and formal science fields, authors should take extra care with
poetic expressions, in case their choice is judged inappropriate. This includes interdisciplinary
research overlapping these areas. Conversely, reviewers of interdisciplinary research
involving the social sciences should be more tolerant of poetic licens