Quantifying cohesion in high citation research article titles: a cross-disciplinary and diachronic investigation

Abstract

This study presents the result of a cross-disciplinary and diachronic examination of cohesive devices used in high citation research article (HCRA) titles, a hitherto less-explored subgenre of academic discourse. Based on Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) Cohesion Model, the research analyzed the employment of connectors in a self-constructed corpus of 30,000 HCRA titles from disciplines of Biology, Chemistry, Linguistics, and Music from 1980 to 2023. Comparisons of disciplinary and diachronic changes of connectors were made in two-way multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA), and follow-up analyses of variance (ANOVA). Major findings indicate that discipline, as compared to period, is the determinant of cohesion in HCRA titles, albeit in medium effect size. The use of Extension and Enhancement prevail HCRA titles, suggesting an exponential increase of sophistication and comprehensiveness of information in the curation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Specifically, cohesion of HCRA titles is predominantly realized by additive, temporal, and causal connectors with sharp contrasts between soft and hard sciences, indicating longer titles with these connectors attract readers by harnessing their familiarity of disciplinary knowledge. Quantitative characterization of cohesion in HCRA titles shed light on how expert writers coherently organize titles to maximize informativeness and research impact, thereby contributing pedagogically to academic writing for English for Academic and Specific Purposes, and empirically for the research on the predictability of citation impacts.