Patiently-Drafted Titles: Focusing on Form and Content of Research Article Titles in Iranian Applied Linguistics Journals

Research article (RA) titles are one of the most important elements of a manuscript, influencing the reviewers’ decision and editors’ judgment, attracting the readers, and conveying the main idea of the article. Investigating ۳۱۹۷ RA titles published in ۱۶ approved Iranian linguistic journals, this study aimed to map their pattern and portray their features of form and content. To this end, all the RA titles of the ۱۶ Iranian journals publishing articles in applied linguistics up to ۲۰۲۲ (۳۱۹۷ titles) were collected. Then, they were analyzed for their length, presence of non-alphanumeric characters, syntactic structure, lexical diversity, as well as type and trend of information encoded.  Results show that RA titles in Iranian linguistic journals tend to be pretty long (average of ۱۳.۸۸) but mostly consist of non-repetitive words with high lexical diversity (.۹۴). Authors mainly used colons (average of ۸۲), hyphens (average of ۷۹), and commas (average of ۳۷) to form titles by nominal (average of ۹۴) and compound (average of ۸۲) grammatical structures. These titles mostly tended to embed information about the method, data, and results of the works and appeared to be highly informative. Interrelationships between features resulted in a checklist for RA title features that can be used by prospective researchers, academic writing instructors, and reviewers.

کلیدواژه ها:

Encoded information ، lexical diversity ، linguistic research articles ، syntactic structures ، titles