Titles are "serious stuff": a historical study of academic titles

Authors

  • Françoise Salager-Meyer
  • María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza

Keywords:

English, medicine, case reports, titles, diachronic analysis

Abstract

In this paper we carried out a diachronic analysis (1840-2009) of a corpus of 180 medical case report titles drawn from the British Medical Journal. We analyzed a series of quantitative variables (number of authors and their institutional affiliation, title length, and punctuation/grammatical data) and qualitative variables (authors’ collaboration and types of titles). The results of our research show various shifts over the period studied that could be attributed to the following factors: 1) the progressive professionalization of medicine; 2) the need of disci-plinary teams to conduct an ever-increasing complex research; and 3) the increased special-ization and the growing complexity of medical science. The only variable that has remained constant over the years is the nominal nature of case report titles. It could then be stated that case report titles would distinguish themselves from research article titles, which are being characterized by a certain tendency towards verbalization.

Downloads

Published

2022-08-31

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2013): Jahr - Annual of the Department of Social Sciences and Medical Humanities

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  1. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  1. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).