What are the most common title words in technical communication publications?

While titles are an important component of scholarly and trade publications, they have been understudied within the field of professional and technical communication. In particular, the field has not empirically analyzed the titles of publications within our discipline. Such empirical study can pres...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Boettger, Ryan K., Friess, Erin
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
AntConc
Correspondence analysis
Documentation
Libraries
Pragmatics
research article titles
word frequency
XML
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:While titles are an important component of scholarly and trade publications, they have been understudied within the field of professional and technical communication. In particular, the field has not empirically analyzed the titles of publications within our discipline. Such empirical study can present a clearer picture of how our field has evolved and what are the theoretical and practical tenets of our discipline. In this study, we begin to explore these issues. First, in a corpus that includes the title of every article published in the five major technical communication scholarly publications and the one trade publication between 1996 and 2013, we determine what the most common words used within titles are. We then determine what words are unique to scholarly publications or trade publications. Finally, we explore how the common words have changed over time.
ISSN:2158-091X
DOI:10.1109/IPCC.2014.7020350