Notes
This paper investigates if chemistry paper titles have gotten better. due to the introduction of keyword in context permuted title indexes in 1958. The hypothesis is that informative titles are becoming more popular and less informative ones are falling out of the pool.
300 articles are sampled. 10 articles are selected from 10 journals over 3 years for the years 1948, 1958, and 1968 (this paper was published in 1970).
The criteria for informative:
- Number of substantive words in the title
- Number of substantive title worlds that match words in the abstract using a thesaurus
- Same as 2, but only exact word matches
- Number of substantive title words that match the ten leading terms from the abstract using a thesaurus.
- Same as 4, with only exact matches
The results are that they are statistically significant differences in 20 titles from 1948, 1958, and 1968.
Most of the changes come from the period between 1958 and 1968, where short titles fall over time, and titles are more aligned with their abstracts.