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“Pealkiri paneb rattad käima”: uurimus pealkirjadest ja pealkirjastamise protsessist
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With the arrival of the Internet the already-existing mass media have undergone a complete revolution. Among the most affected subtypes one could easily distinguish the press, which had to find its own place within the new medium. The fierce competition in the realm of online publishing has engendered a number of idiosyncratic linguistic devices used to lure the readers. One of the most popular ones is the phenomenon recognized as clickbait, i.e. an umbrella term for a number of techniques used to attract attention and arouse curiosity. In the following paper, we shall investigate the presence of the said phenomenon in online headlines. In order to do that we shall perform a corpus-based analysis of the data acquired from the most popular American social news outlets on the Internet, namely Buzzfeed, TMZ and E!Online. Apart from establishing the extent to which clickbait has dominated online headlines, we shall also pinpoint and discuss the specific linguistic techniques used to attract potential readers.
What makes a “good” title for an article, i.e. one which might attract citations in the academic community? Answers to this question are manifold, though inconclusive across disciplines. In an attempt to provide cohesion, we integrate significant title characteristics from previous studies across disciplines into a comprehensive model and link it with citation count. Keeping the application context constant, we focus on management science and find that only non-alpha numeric characters and a balanced title structure have small, but significant effects on citation count. Surprisingly, attributes which tended to show significant effects in other disciplines (though often in opposite directions), such as length, context, and linguistic attributes exhibited no relationship with citation count.
With increasing diversification of research, a research article depends much upon the title to encapsulate its distinctive content. The present study aims to examine the syntactic structures and functions of research article titles in applied linguistics. Using a corpus of 796 titles from four journals that are included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), we identified five syntactic structures, namely, compound, nominal, full-sentence, V-ing phrase, and prepositional phrase. Of the five structures, compound titles, which enable research article writers to present dual foci of studies, constitute more than half of the occurrences, followed by nominal titles, which can concisely summarize the essence of studies. Each of the other three structures accounts for a very small percentage. A second-phase analysis was performed on the two constituent elements of the compound titles and on the heads and modifiers of the nominal titles. For the former, a total of eleven categories were found, revealing a wide variety of crucial aspects of research in applied linguistics, including mainly Topic-Scope, Topic-Method, Topic-Description, Topic-Source, Metaphor-Topic, and Topic-Question. For the nominal titles, both discipline-specific and non-discipline-specific heads were recognized. A majority of the discipline-specific heads are compound nouns, and prepositional phrases are widely used as post-modifiers. The analysis results provide useful information for the academic writing pedagogy.
A poorly chosen article title may make a paper difficult to discover or discourage readership when discovered, reducing an article's impact. Yet, it is unclear how the structure of a manuscript's title influences readership and impact. We used manuscript tracking data for all manuscripts submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from 2004 to 2013 and citation data for papers published in this journal from 1987 to 2011 to examine how title features changed and whether a manuscript's title structure was predictive of success during the manuscript review process and/or impact (citation) after publication. Titles of manuscripts submitted to Functional Ecology became marginally longer (after controlling for other variables), broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study. Papers with subtitles were less likely to be rejected by editors both pre- and post-peer review, although both effects were small and the presence of subtitles in published papers was not predictive of citations. Papers with specific names of study organisms in their titles fared poorly during editorial (but not peer) review and, if published, were less well cited than papers whose titles did not include specific names. Papers with intermediate length titles were more successful during editorial review, although the effect was small and title word count was not predictive of citations. No features of titles were predictive of reviewer willingness to review papers or the length of time a paper was in peer review. We conclude that titles have changed in structure over time, but features of title structure have only small or no relationship with success during editorial review and post-publication impact. The title feature that was most predictive of manuscript success: papers whose titles emphasize broader conceptual or comparative issues fare better both pre- and post-publication than do papers with organism-specific titles.
Titles can alter the comprehension of a text by affecting the selection of information from a text and the organization of this information in memory. Text comprehension is assumed to involve an organizational process that results in the formation of a text base, an ordered list of semantic units-propositions. The text base can be used as a retrieval scheme to reconstruct the text. Procedures for assigning propositions as more relevant to some themes as compared to other themes are developed and applied to texts. Texts with biasing titles were used in an experiment to demonstrate that immediate free recall is biased toward the theme emphasized in the title. The comprehension process which is guided by the text's thematical information is described.
Drawing on a corpus of clickbait headlines (Chakraborty et al., 2016) and using ideas from the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95), this paper examines some of the ways in which writers of clickbait headlines arouse the curiosity of their readers by creating an “information gap” (Loewenstein, 1994). Comparative corpus analysis is combined with close analysis of illustrative examples to explore the contribution that particular parts-of-speech make to the creation of successful clickbait. I focus on two main categories that are overrepresented in clickbait headlines to a statistically significant degree: (i) definite referring expressions and (ii) superlatives and intensifiers. The results and analysis reveal that these parts-of-speech contribute to an information gap by encouraging readers to construct new conceptual files based on the terms used in the headline, while providing little or no content for those files. This then drives the reader to click on the associated link with the expectation that the article will contain relevant information with which he can enhance his conceptual files, and that this, in turn, will reward him with cognitive effects.
To prevent a paper from being discarded and ensure that it addresses the right audience, it must have a proper title that satisfies certain requirements. Writing the titles to scientific articles is therefore a challenging exercise that demands the use of various skills. Still, although the research paper is one of the most thoroughly studied scientific genres, the study of research paper titles does not share the same privilege, nor does the study of review paper titles.The purpose of this research and discussion note (RD) is to examine the most recurrent structural constructions of titles in two different genres, namely, review papers (RVP) and research papers (RP) in two fields: biological sciences and social sciences. More specifically, the questions raised are, on the one hand, whether the structural construction of titles is a key distinctive feature between RP titles and RVP titles, and, on the other, whether the inherent peculiarities of scientific disciplines imprint differences on the structural constructions of RP and RVP titles. Our RD was based on a corpus of 570 titles, of which 480 were RP titles and the remaining 90 were RVP titles, all covering the period 1996–2002. Words per title were firstly counted to measure their length and all structural constructions detected, namely, nominal, question, compound, and full-sentence constructions, were registered. Results evidence an interesting finding regarding the full-sentence title construction which appears not only as a generic peculiarity of RPs but also as a disciplinary peculiarity of Biology RP titles. The lines of evidence registered in this RD support suggestions as to how to guide novice scientists to write titles appropriately.
Comprehension of a non-text: The effect of the title and ambiguity tolerance
- Alireza Ahmadi
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Academic clickbait: Articles with positively-framed titles, interesting phrasing, and no wordplay get more attention online
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The effects of topic title on language comprehension and working memory resources. MSc Dissertation. University of British Columbia
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