Titles and keywords: ‘Great love isn’t two people finding the perfect match in one another!’

Abstract

Compared with abstracts, titles and keywords are briefer, more condensed, but fragmented textual elements on the first page of research articles (RAs) that summarise their content and represent their themes to enhance the discoverability. Therefore, the hidden, subtle relationship between titles and associated keywords increasingly attracts scholars’ attention. This research attempts to analyse title lengths and lexical words of two major title types: nominal titles and colonic titles, and investigate the matching coefficient (MC) values between lexical words and keywords assigned by authors. A total number of 505 RA titles from 15 journals in Library and Information Science were examined. Regarding title length and lexical words, the results found statistically significant differences between colonic and nominal titles. However, the results did not support the hypothesis that colonic titles have a higher MC value with author-assigned keywords than nominal titles. In light of significant findings, this research recommends constructing titles that maximise informativity and build effective keywords.