What Are the Most Common Title Words in Technical Communication Publications?

Researcher’s note (June 2026). Erin Friess and I wrote this in 2014 as a first empirical look at the titles of our field’s scholarly and trade publications—the simple idea being that the words we choose for titles quietly reveal what a discipline values and how it sees itself. We were struck by how clearly the corpus showed the field trading “writing” for “communication” over eighteen years. That same instinct—reading large text corpora to surface patterns people don’t consciously notice—runs straight into my current work on AI in writing and assessment, where the question is again what the words on the page tell us about the work being done.

Abstract

While titles are an important component of scholarly and trade publications, they have been understudied within the field of professional and technical communication. In particular, the field has not empirically analyzed the titles of publications within our discipline. Such empirical study can present a clearer picture of how our field has evolved and what are the theoretical and practical tenets of our discipline. In this study, we begin to explore these issues. First, in a corpus that includes the title of every article published in the five major technical communication scholarly publications and the one trade publication between 1996 and 2013, we determine what the most common words used within titles are. We then determine what words are unique to scholarly publications or trade publications. Finally, we explore how the common words have changed over time.

Index Terms – AntConc, Correspondence analysis, research article titles, word frequency

Introduction

Titles of articles within research journals and trade publications serve as a critical “first point of contact between writer and potential reader” [1]. Titles are among the most frequently read parts of an article [2], attract potential readers to an article [3], and often are the deciding mechanism as to whether the reader will read the entirety of an article [4]. Indeed, according to Mabe and Amin [5], researchers read ten times as many titles per year as compared to complete articles. Further, titles often are used by search engines and information retrieval systems to compare to potential reader queries [6, 7].

Yet, beyond being critical elements of articles, titles, taken in aggregate as a corpus, provide insight into the themes, values, and genres of a discipline. According to Milojević et al. [8], “the analysis of words derived from document titles…appears to be a promising approach to trace processes of discourse formation and cognitive structure of fields or disciplines.” While this approach has been used to assess other disciplines, such as library and information sciences [8] and computer science [9], no study has attempted to assess the current status of and disciplinary shifts within professional and technical communication using this titles-centric discourse approach. While it may seem obvious that the titles of these two types of publications would be different, no study has empirically assessed the titles for such differences.

Therefore, in this exploratory study, we aim to assess the titles of articles within the five leading technical communication journals (IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Technical Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly) as well as the field’s trade publication (Intercom). We recorded every title in these six publications from 1996 (which is when the most recent publication, Intercom, debuted as a full-fledged publication) through 2013. We explore how, based on data gathered from the analysis of the titles, the differences in how our field’s academics and practitioners describe their content.

To that end, we ask these three research questions: (1) What words are most common to the peer-reviewed and trade publications in the field? (2) What words are unique to each publication type? (3) How has the use of these common words changed over time?

In order to answer these questions, we will review the relevant literature, explain our methodology, present our results, and then discuss the implications of the findings.

Review of Literature

While titles are an important component of any article, they are generally understudied as a genre. In technical and professional communication, few studies have conducted any kind of analysis on titles. Thompson [10] conducted a “qualitative content analysis” on the titles of articles within the same peer-reviewed research journals as this study over a 12-year period in order to identify thematic trends about women, gender, and feminist studies within technical communication. In 2001, Thompson [11] conducted a similar study using the same methodology to study articles in the same research journals over a 10-year period to identify themes related to collaboration within technical communication. While these two studies use titles to identify articles that likely fit within the defined framework (e.g., gender, collaboration), they do not specifically compare characteristic features of the titles, define typologies of the titles, or note broader themes to asses the field as a cohesive discipline.

Analysis of titles has generally received more attention in fields such as STEM, library and information sciences, and linguistics. In these disciplines, two general veins of title study appear. The first is an analysis of discrete characteristics of the title. These characteristics have included the use of question marks [12], clichés [13], length of title [7, 14], colons [15, 16], and humor [17, 18]. The second vein is an analysis of structures used to develop typologies, such as full sentence titles, compound titles, and fragment titles [1, 4, 9, 19, 20]. In both kinds of analysis, the studies generally explore frequencies of the phenomenon within a given field, and then often make claims of that phenomenon to citation rates, download rates, or other characteristics.

Two articles are of note here. First, Anthony [9] created lists of statistically significant words within his corpus of computer science journals, which indicate which words were likely to be found within a title of a particular journal. Second, Milojević et al [8], explored a collection of titles from 16 library and information science journals over a 19 year period. They identified the most common words, collocates, clustering, and words unique to a particular journal.

It is these two studies that we hope to emulate in order to answer our research questions.

Research Questions

(1) What words are most common to the peer-reviewed and trade publications in the field? (2) What words are unique to each publication type? (3) How has the use of these common words changed over time?

Methods

The corpus for our study included every article title published in Intercom and the five leading technical communication journals from 1996-2013. We began our inquiry in 1996 to coincide with the publication of the first issues of Intercom. We concluded with 2013, which, at the time of coding, provided the latest complete volume of each publication. In total, our comprehensive corpus of article titles in technical communication publications consisted of 3697 titles, 5018 word types, and 31,331 word tokens.

We explored the corpus through AntConc, a free text processing tool that was initially conceived for use in the technical writing classroom [21, 22]. The features of AntConc allowed us to generate a wordlist of the most frequent titles words in trade and scholarly publications as well as keywords unique to each publication type. Correspondence analysis was used to address the evolutionary trends of the three most frequent title words over the 18-year period. We explain these methodological approaches with more depth in the results section.

Results

The first research question addressed the title words that were most common to scholarly and trade publications in the field over the 18-year period. We explored this question using the Word list feature in AntConc and a 25-word stop list containing common English words like articles and prepositions. As shown in Table 1, a condensed list of the 20 most common words in the combined list of scholarly and trade publications begins with technical (n = 710) communication (n = 583), and writing (n = 323) and then drops substantially in frequency.

Table I. Twenty Most Common Words in Article Titles of Technical and Professional Communication Scholarly and Trade Publications (1996-2013)

Word	Frequency
technical	710
communication	583
writing	323
web	179
your	158
information	152
design	136
learning	120
professional	119
study	113
online	111
how	109
using	107
what	106
research	99
business	96
user	92
you	91
documentation	90
communicators	86

When analyzed by publication type, differences between words and their rankings emerged (see Table 2). The titles of scholarly publications and titles of trade publications only shared four titles words in the list of 10 most frequent words: technical, communication, writing, and information. Intercom included six unique words, such as audience-inclusive language like you and your. The scholarly publications also included six unique words, such as research-focused words like study and research. These findings begin to suggest differences between the publication types.

Table II. Comparison of Ten Most Common Words within Trade Publication Titles to Ten Most Common Words within Scholarly Publication Titles (1996-2013)

Trade Publications Words (and Frequencies)	Scholarly Publication Words (and Frequencies)
technical (239)	communication (476)
your (153)	technical (471)
communication (107)	writing (231)
web (92)	professional (110)
writing (92)	study (106)
you (85)	information (101)
what (67)	design (95)
documentation (57)	research (90)
information (51)	learning (88)
content (50)	web (87)

The second research question addressed which title words were unique to each publication type. We explored this question using the Keyword List feature in AntConc. Unique keywords to any corpus are derived by comparing words in the targeted corpus to a reference corpus. For this study, we compared the corpus of article titles in trade publications to scholarly publications (and vice versa) to generate the words unique to each publication type. As shown in Table 3, the strength of each keyword is determined by its keyness, a difference measure. The normal critical value for keyness is 3.84 (or p < 0.05). The keywords included in Table 3, however, contain a critical value of 15.13 or above (or p < 0.0001). In other words, the higher the keyness measure, the more likely it is for that particular word to be found in the title of an article within one journal type (e.g., a scholarly journal) as compared to the other journal type (e.g., the trade journal). For example, you is more unique to the titles of articles from the trade publications, while communication is more unique within the titles of articles from scholarly journals. Table 3 includes the first 20 unique keywords to trade and scholarly publications, sorted by their keyness.

Table III. Comparison of Frequency and Keyness of Common Words within Article Titles

Trade: Word	Trade: Frequency	Trade: Keyness	Scholarly: Word	Scholarly: Frequency	Scholarly: Keyness
you	85	165.441	communication	476	164.651
tips	31	74.913	study	106	79.857
what	67	50.124	professional	110	76.472
marketing	29	48.543	rhetorical	65	73.996
career	33	47.616	rhetoric	79	69.204
DITA	19	45.915	analysis	71	60.725
XML	29	45.234	engineering	69	58.616
get	18	43.498	research	90	57.162
documentation	57	42.875	genre	46	52.366
help	43	40.983	case	71	45.408
editing	42	40.966	discourse	36	40.982
writer	31	36.456	organizational	35	39.844
content	50	36.268	effects	33	37.567
STC	26	36.204	theory	36	33.457
web	92	36.058	science	54	32.479
part	30	34.607	technology	72	30.944
quality	39	32.877	approach	38	30.716
interview	16	31.768	writing	231	30.59
HTML	13	31.415	visual	55	30.582
can	26	31.407	between	32	29.136

These keywords offer a more complete sense of how the publication types differ. Scholarly publications appear to emphasize rhetoric or perhaps rhetorical or discourse approaches to content while Intercom offers tips related to professional development (e.g., career, interview). Similarly, Intercom titles tend to emphasize people (you, writer) and specific technologies (DITA, XML, and HTML) compared to the scholarly publications’ emphasis on modifiers (professional, rhetorical, organizational) and technology in its broader context.

The final research question addressed how the title words evolved over the 18-year period. These results might suggest differences between publication types as well as how the field’s overall approach to content has changed. For example, scatter plots revealed a downward regression for writing and technical within both publication types. The use of writing and technical in titles decreased 65.5% and 19.5%, respectively from 1996 to 2013. Figure 1 illustrates the dramatic decline in the use of writing in both publication types though the regression line indicates this decline was most prevalent in the scholarly publications.

[Figure 1: Decline of writing in titles of scholarly and trade journal articles — image to be added.]

Conversely, the scatter plot for communication revealed an upward regression over the 18-year period and increased in use 76% from 1996 to 2013. Figure 2 also illustrates the increase of this word was found in both publication types, but, once again, was more prevalent in the scholarly publications.

[Figure 2: Increase of communication in titles of scholarly and trade journal articles — image to be added.]

To further explore these longitudinal changes, we analyzed the frequency of the top three title words (technical, communication, and writing) within the 18-year time period (grouped into 6, 3-year periods for better clarity). Correspondence analysis (or CA) is a geometric technique used to analyze two-way and multi-way tables containing some measure of correspondence between the rows and columns [23, 24]. Due to its exploratory approach, CA is not a method used to test hypotheses. Instead, the results reveal patterns in complex data and provide output that can help researchers interpret these patterns. The most useful component of CA is its ability to visually organize the data in the categories into central and peripheral instances. The increasing distance of any representative of either category from the origin corresponds to a higher degree of differentiation as compared with the other members with respect to their co-occurrences with the data in the other category.

Our CA (Figure 3) found the strongest relationship between writing and 1996-1998. During these years, the word was used 77 times. The second strongest relationship was between communication and 2011-2013. During these years, the word was used 108 times. Two relationship pairs are also plotted on opposite sides of Figure 3, suggesting that the use of writing has substantially decreased and perhaps been replaced with communication in more recent years. This inference is further supported by the 65.5% decrease in writing and the 76% increase in communication from 1996 to 2013. No meaningful relationships exist between technical and any of the year clusters were identified. This indicates that while the word has decreased over the 18-year period, this decline is not purposeful.

[Figure 3: Correspondence analysis of communication, technical, and writing — image to be added.]

Discussion

This study provides the first empirical analysis of the article titles in trade and scholarly publications in the technical and professional communication field. These results provide three critical take-aways. First, this study provides empirical evidence that the words within the titles of the scholarly and trade publications within the field of technical and professional communication do, in fact, vary. While the findings are perhaps not surprising, they reveal distinct divides between publications of practitioners and scholars. Intercom seems to rely on title words that convey specific skills that can be appropriated by practitioners to improve their careers and internal value to an employer. In contrast, the scholarly publications seem to rely on title words that invoke more abstract constructs. While Intercom references specific technological tools, such DITA or XML, the scholarly journals reference broader notions of technology.

Second, this study has shown that the common words of both the scholarly and trade publications have changed over time. The general trend seems to show that the first eight years of this analysis emphasized notions of tangibility, such as writing, document/s, computer, and site. Those terms fade from prominence in the second eight years of the analysis, replaced with words of less specificity, such as communication, media, mobile, and global. In particular, the shift from an emphasis on writing to an emphasis on communication is of note. Again, this shift from specificity to abstraction is not particularly surprising and marks the desire for those in the profession to not be pigeonholed as only “writers,” as recent studies have shown that technical writers/communicators do far more in addition to writing or communicating [25, 26, 27] However, in shedding the identity of “writer,” technical communication professionals have struggled to find a description or profile that accurately depicts their work. Communication is a broader concept that, theoretically, could hold a collection of people who communicate but who do not specifically write content. This study suggests that marketing, documentation, content, HTML, and help are all aspects of the field that help define what professionals actually do.

Finally, just as professionals have struggled with finding an encompassing description of their work with the decline of writing and the increase of the communication, academics have struggled with what technical and professional programs should be named. A recent thread in the CPTSC list-serv (February 2014) discussed that though technical communication programs often go through name changes (from Technical Writing to Technical and Professional Communication, for example), these academic programs often struggle to identify language that accurately represents what they do as scholars and as teachers. This study suggests that if a program were a terminal, pre-professional degree, then perhaps a way to attract students (and the search engines they utilize) would be to house programs that invoke words within the article titles of the trade journals, such as documentation, content, or XML. For advanced academic degrees, programs should perhaps invoke terms such as rhetoric, discourse, technology, or analysis that are found within the titles of scholarly journals.

Conclusion and Future Research

While titles are a critical component of articles within scholarly and trade journals, they have been understudied as a mechanism that provides insights into the values, proclivities, and goals of the professional and technical communication profession. The study has been a first attempt to both synthesize and analyze the titles from scholarly and trade journals to begin to assess the similarities and differences in the focus of articles and the values of the field. The results of this close longitudinal analysis of the title words may also enable both professionals and scholars to better position themselves as valuable members of their respective workplace.

Additionally, the results of this study suggest two broad lines of future research using a corpus-based approach and exploratory measures like correspondence analysis. First, the study limited its corpus to the titles of the articles within scholarly and trade journals. It may be fruitful to assess a corpus of completed articles to determine additional shifts in values and focus. For example, an analysis of the full text may provide a more nuanced assessment of issues that challenge and define the field. The results could suggest ways to reconcile the perceived gap between technical communication academics and practitioners.

Second, titles could again be the corpus of reference in a comparative analysis in the similarities and differences of professional and technical communication article titles to article titles in other fields. For example, titles could be assessed syntactically and structurally to determine which other humanities-based fields (such as linguistics or English) professional and technical communication titles most closely emulate.

Finally, this correspondence analysis should be repeated at regular intervals to determine how the values and challenges of the field continue to manifest themselves in the titles of the articles of our scholarly and professional work and how those values and challenges continue to change over time.

About the Authors

Ryan K. Boettger is an assistant professor in the Department of Technical Communication, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. His research areas include curriculum development and assessment, STEM education, technical editing, and grant writing. He is the co-creator of TechCorp, a soon-to-be publicly released corpus of student technical writing.

Erin Friess is an associate professor in the Department of Technical Communication, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA. Her research areas include decision-making communication, workplace communication, discourse analysis, and usability and user experience practice.

References

1. M. Haggan, “Research paper titles in literature, linguistics and science: Dimensions of attraction,” J. Pragmatics, vol. 36, pp. 293-317, 2004.
2. D. A. Cook et al. A systematic review of titles and abstracts of experimental studies in medical education: many informative elements missing. Medical Education, 41:11, 1074–1081, 2007.
3. G. Lewison and J. Hartley, “What’s in a title? Numbers of words and the presence of colons,” Scientometrics, vol. 63, pp. 341-356, 2005.
4. Y. Wang and Y. Bai, “A corpus-based syntactic study of medical research article titles,” System, vol. 35, pp. 388-399, 2007.
5. M. A. Mabe and M. Amin, “Dr Jekyll and Dr Hyde: author-reader asymmetries in scholarly publishing,” in Aslib Proceedings, 2002, pp. 149-157.
6. H. R. Jamali and M. Nikzad, “Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations,” Scientometrics, vol. 88, pp. 653-661, 2011.
7. M. Yitzhaki, “Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article,” Scientometrics, vol. 54, pp. 435-447, 2002.
8. S. Milojević et al. “The cognitive structure of library and information science: Analysis of article title words,” J. Amer. Soc. for Inform. Sci. and Technology, vol. 62, pp. 1933-1953, 2011.
9. L. Anthony, “Characteristic features of research article titles in computer science,” Professional Communication, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 44, pp. 187-194, 2001.
10. I. Thompson, “Women and Feminism in Technical Communication A Qualitative Content Analysis of Journal Articles Published in 1989 through 1997,” J. Bus. and Tech. Communication, vol. 13, pp. 154-178, 1999.
11. I. Thompson, “Collaboration in technical communication: a qualitative content analysis of journal articles, 1990-1999,” IEEE Trans. Prof. Commun., vol. 44, pp. 161-173, 2001.
12. R. Ball, “Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005,” Scientometrics, vol. 79, pp. 667-679, 2009.
13. N. Goodman, “Familiarity breeds: clichés in article titles,” British J. General Practice, vol. 62, pp. 656-657, 2012.
14. F. Habibzadeh and M. Yadollahie, “Are shorter article titles more attractive for citations? Crosssectional study of 22 scientific journals,” Croatian Medical J., vol. 51, pp. 165-170, 2010.
15. M. Wesel et al. “What a difference a colon makes: how superficial factors influence subsequent citation,” Scientometrics, vol. 98, pp. 1601-1615, 2014.
16. J. Hartley, “Planning that title: Practices and preferences for titles with colons in academic articles,” Library & Inform. Sci. Research, vol. 29, pp. 553-568, 2007.
17. I. Sagi and E. Yechiam, “Amusing titles in scientific journals and article citation,” J. Inform. Sci., vol. 34, pp. 680-687, 2008.
18. S. Subotic and B. Mukherjee, “Short and amusing: The relationship between title characteristics, downloads, and citations in psychology articles,” J. Inform. Sci., vol. 40, pp. 115-124, 2014.
19. T. S. Jacques and N. J. Sebire, “The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals,” JRSM Short Reports, vol. 1, p. 2, 2010.
20. A. Jalilifar et al., “An Exploration of Generic Tendencies in Applied Linguistics Titles,” J. Faculty of Letters and Humanities, vol. 5, pp. 35-57, 2010.
21. L. Anthony, “AntConc: design and development of a freeware corpus analysis toolkit for the technical writing classroom,” in Professional Communication Conference Proc., 2005, pp. 729-737.
22. L. Anthony, “Issues in the design and development of software tools for corpus studies: The case for collaboration,” in Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, P. Baker, Ed., ed London, UK: Continuum Press, 2009, pp. 87-104.
23. M. Greenacre, Correspondence Analysis in Practice. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall, 2007.
24. M. Greenacre, Theory and Application of Correspondence Analysis. London: Academic Press, 1984.
25. W. Hart-Davidson, “On writing, technical communication, and information technology: The core competencies of technical communication,” Tech. Communication, vol. 48, pp. 145-155, 2001.
26. G. F. Hayhoe, “Core competencies: The essence of technical communication,” Tech. communication, vol. 49, pp. 397-398, 2002.
27. K. T. Rainey, et al., “Do curricula correspond to managerial expectations? Core competencies for technical communicators,” Tech. communication, vol. 52, pp. 323-352, 2005.