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

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 disciplinary teams to conduct an ever-increasing complex research; and 3) the increased specialization 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.