Syntactic structures of Turkish research article titles in medicine and engineering

Dursun Demir

African Educational Research Journal
Published: August 29 2023
Volume 11, Issue 3
Pages 403-412
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30918/AERJ.113.23.068

Abstract

The title is of vital importance to research articles as it summarizes the content in several words and grabs the attention of readers. When selecting articles pertinent to their research, the prevalence of online publication leads readers to use online search engines like Google Scholar, which generally displays the first few words of a title, making the title highly important. This study aimed to investigate some key features, such as length, style, syntactic structure and punctuation marks of titles in Turkish research articles in medicine and engineering. To this end, we selected 1,200 titles in four leading journals publishing research articles in these disciplines. As a tool to collect data, document analysis was used in the study to analyze such features of titles and in analyzing the data, descriptive analysis technique was used. The study revealed that both medicine and engineering have almost the equivalent title length. Titles in both disciplines are dominated by single-unit ones and both single-unit and compound titles are predominated by nominal group construction. The results also suggested some disciplinary differences: Compound titles were more common in medicine than in engineering. Medical titles appear to have used more varied syntactic structures in forming titles. Moreover, medical titles have shown a high degree of complexity in terms of punctuation usage. The differences might be attributed to disciplinary practices set out in these two fields. The results of the present study will provide novice writers with ample opportunity to construct their titles as best they can while maintaining their effort to build and enhance their academic writing skills.

Keywords: Titles, title length, syntactic structures, medicine, engineering.

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