Titles in Highly Ranked Multidisciplinary Psychology Journals 1966–2011: More Words and Punctuation Marks Allow for the Communication of More Information
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Titles of articles in seven highly ranked multidisciplinary psychology journals for every fifth year between 1966 and 2011 (inclusive) were studied in terms of title length, word length, punctuation density, and word pleasantness, activation, and concreteness (assessed by the Dictionary of Affect in Language). Titles grew longer (by three words) and were more frequently punctuated (by one colon or comma for every other article) between 1966 and 2011. This may reflect the increasing complexity of psychology and satisfy readers' requirements for more specific information. There were significant differences among journals (e.g., titles in the Annual Review of Psychology were scored by the Dictionary of Affect as the most pleasant, and those in Psychological Bulletin as the least pleasant) and among categories of journals (e.g., titles in review journals employed longer words than those in research or association journals). Differences were stable across time and were employed to successfully categorize titles from a validation sample.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.026 | 0.025 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".