Increasing field complexity revealed through article title analyses
✍ Scribed by White, Arden ;Hernandez, Nelda Rae
- Book ID
- 101250107
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1991
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 329 KB
- Volume
- 42
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-8231
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Has the relatively new field of counseling developed like other, older fields? And how have they developed, as mirrored in the titles to articles in principal journals? Eighteen journals, including five in the field of counseling, were sampled. Approximately 24,500 titles were analyzed for changes in length and/or complexity over time. All but the three newest journals, those founded since 1970, showed a distinct trend of longer, more complex titles, suggesting that as fields mature, they become more complex. introduction Titles of articles are an important index to the contents, and thus to the underlying field: "They constitute the most concise statement of the content of a document" (Diener, 1984, p. 222). "Titles form the connecting point between writer and reader, . . . between one scholar and another" (Nahl-Jakobovits & Jakobovits, 1987, pp. 169-170