THE VARIATION IN THE INFORMATION CONTENT OF TITLES OF RESEARCH PAPERS WITH TIME AND DISCIPLINE

The relative information content of titles of research papers in different subject areas has been examined by counting the number of their ‘substantive’ words in eleven English periodicals, two French and two German. Chemistry and botany (in which KWIC indexes are already produced) are found to have the highest values, followed by physics, medicine, history, and the social sciences, with philosophy lowest. The information content of the foreign titles when translated into English was almost equal to that of English titles in the same subjects. Most subjects showed a significant increase in the number of substantive words between 1947 and 1973. Some difficulties of searching by title due to the vocabularies of non‐scientific subjects are discussed.