Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren't (natural) science

TL;DR

This study analyzes the prevalence of poetic and literary expressions in scientific article titles across various fields from 1996 to 2019, revealing disciplinary differences in their usage and implications for authors and reviewers.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive quantitative analysis of poetic expressions in scientific titles across disciplines, highlighting field-specific practices and cultural norms.

Findings

Poetic expressions are most common in social sciences and humanities.

They are relatively common in medicine.

Almost absent from engineering and natural sciences.

Abstract

Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for their publications, but would this be mistaken in some fields? Whilst poetic titles are known to be common in medicine, it is not clear whether the practice is widespread elsewhere. This article investigates the prevalence of poetic expressions in journal article titles 1996-2019 in 3.3 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually checking all phrases with at least 5 words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149 stock phrases, idioms, sayings, literary allusions, film names and song titles or lyrics. The expressions found are most common in the social sciences and the humanities. They are also relatively common in medicine, but almost absent from engineering and the natural and formal sciences. The differences may reflect the less hierarchical and more varied nature of the social sciences and humanities, where interesting titles may attract an audience. In engineering, natural science and formal science fields, authors should take extra care with poetic expressions, in case their choice is judged inappropriate. This includes interdisciplinary research overlapping these areas. Conversely, reviewers of interdisciplinary research involving the social sciences should be more tolerant of poetic license.