Increasing Field Complexity Revealed through Article
Title Analyses
Arden White and Nelda Rae Hernandez
University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071-3374
Has the relatively new field of counseling developed like
other, older fields? And how have they developed, as
mirrored in the titles to articles in principal journals?
Eighteen journals, including five in the field of counsel-
ing, were sampled. Approximately 24,500 titles were an-
alyzed for changes in length and/or complexity over
time. All but the three newest journals, those founded
since 1970, showed a distinct trend of longer, more com-
plex titles, suggesting that as fields mature, they be-
come more complex.
introduction
Titles of articles are an important index to the con-
tents, and thus to the underlying field: “They constitute
the most concise statement of the content of a docu-
ment” (Diener, 1984, p. 222). “Titles form the connect-
ing point between writer and reader, . . . between one
scholar and another” (Nahl-Jakobovits & Jakobovits,
1987, pp. 169-170). As a field becomes more complex,
therefore, article titles should become either longer, or
contain more complex words, or both. A number of in-
fluences could contribute to such title complexity, in-
cluding the development, refinement, and extension
both of underlying theories and of more and more com-
plex research methods and procedures.
Every field has its special language, and if the field
grows in complexity, the vocabulary of its special lan-
guage enlarges. Has the relatively new field of counsel-
ing developed like other, older fields? And how have
they developed, as mirrored in the titles to articles in
principal journals? In other words, would a field that
evolves from other, well-established fields with well-
developed special languages exhibit similar patterns of
language development as did the older fields?
Received September 17, 1990; revised November 9, 1990; accepted
December 13, 1990.
0 1991 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. 42(10):731-734,
Methods
“To carry out inter-disciplinary comparisons, a tech-
nique is necessary which depends on the content of the
titles alone” (Buxton & Meadows, 1977, p. 46). Most
titles are brief, sentence-like expressions of article con-
tent, through key words linked into a unique expres-
sion. As such, the title announces the article.
We used a direct procedure, counting total words
and characters for specified samples of titles to produce
an index for each sample that could be used to compare
with like indices for the other samples. The Danielson
and Bryan Index (DB#2) (Klare, 1988), designed for
computer applications, was developed as an approxima-
tion of readability similar to those of Flesch, Dale, and
Chall (Klare, 1988), Gunning (Bruce & Rubin, 1988;
Gunning, 1968), and Mali and Sykes (1985).
The computational formula contains three con-
stants, and three variables:
DB#2 = 131.059
- [lo.364 x (Number of Characters
f Number of Words)]
- [.194 x (Number of Characters
t Number of Titles)]
This linear index ranges from near zero (extremely
difficult or complex) to near 100 (extremely simple).
The constants built into the formula are such that the
size of the words has a greater impact on the index than
does the number of words, an important consideration
in a medium that has at least an implied external con-
trol on the number of words to be used. These index
values, one for each year of titles, were the data used in
the two analyses. In effect, approximately 24,500 titles
were reduced to 400 DB#2 “scores.”
Two principal sets and one comparison set of article
title samples were selected. Set 1 consisted of nine jour-
nals in continuous existence since 1923, or earlier, cho-
sen from the fields of education, psychology, social
1991 ccc 0002~8231/91/010731-04$04.00
 TABLE 1. Journal sample summary.

Journal Titles First Total Total

(Titles in use in 1988) Year Years Articles
Sampled Sampled

Set 1”
American Journal of Psychology 1887188 21 1098
American Journal of Sociology 1898199 19 763
Economic Journal 1893 20 523
Journal of Political Economy 1892193 20 866
Journal of Genetic Psychology 1898 20 763
Journal of Educational Psychology 1913 16 1034
Social Casework 1923124 14 787
Journalof Educational Research 1923 14 971
Education 1893194 20 1869
Set 2
Journal of Counseling and Developmentb 1921 34 3082
Journal of Social Psychologyb 1930 30 2525
Career Development Quarterly’ 1952153 37 1634
Journal of College Student Development’ 1959160 29 2619
Journal of Counseling Psychology’ 1954 35 2754
Counselor Education and Supervision’ 1961162 28 1245
Set 3’
Journal of Organizational Behavior 1980 9 218
Research in Higher Education 1973 16 717
Journal of Vocational Behavior 1971 18 1029
Total 24497

“Sampled every fifth year.

!Sampled every second year.
‘All titles used.

work, sociology, and economics, as listed in Table 1. All
of the articles in the years ending in 3 and 8 (1923,
1928, 1933, 1938, . . . ) were used.
Set 2 was composed of five journals representing a
relatively new field, counseling, and one comparator
journal, the Journal of Social Psychology. Two of the
journals were sampled in alternate years; and for the
other four journals, all article titles were used.
Finally, to provide comparison data from journals
with a relatively short life span, three recently founded
journals constituted Set 3. All of the titles for all of the
years since founding through 1988 were accumulated.
Multiple regression and analysis of variance, were
used to test the expectation that the fields represented
by these article titles were becoming more complex
over time.
Results
The correlation between time and the DB#2 index
values for the entire sample was -0.82, significantly
different from zero at the p < -01 level. As the year
index value increased, the DB#2 value decreased, indi-
cating an increase in complexity over time. For Set 1,
covering the longest time span, the correlation was
-0.79, again highly significant. Correlations and beta
weights for the percents of three-syllable words and the
average lengths of titles show that larger, more complex
words contributed somewhat more to the increasing
complexity than did the increase in title size. For the
journals in existence more than two decades, the com-
bination of complex words and length of titles showed a
highly positive relationship to time (Table 2).
An analysis of variance supported the correlation
analysis. DB#2 values for each journal were divided
into blocks. For example, for theAmerican Journal of Psy-
chology, years were divided into the following blocks:
1887/88-1913, 1918-1938, 1943-1963, and 1968-1988.
Time intervals were made as nearly equal as the total
number of observations would allow. For all but the Set
3 journals, four blocks were used. In all instances, the
resulting F-ratio was highly significant, except for Set 3
(Table 3).
The clear trend among the 15 significantly different
subsets of DB#2 values was from less length/complexity
(larger DB#2 index values) to more complexity/length
as the time interval became closer to the present.
Discussion
Nine basic journals were selected for their early
origin, continuous existence and overall representative-
ness as repositories of writing in education, psychology,
economics, and social work. The six journals in Set 2
include four that are closely related, one being the
“parent” of the other three, and two other field-related
journals. Finally, Set 3 journals are typical of newly iden-
tified speciality areas within education and psychology.

732 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE-December 1991

 TABLE 2. Correlation results between the variables of time and the DB#2
index and the percent of three-syllable words and the average length of article
titles.

Correlation” Beta Weight

Percent of Percent of
Three-Syllable Title Three-Syllable Title
Variable DB#2 Words Length Words Length

Total Set
Time -.82 .68 .49 ,587 .298
DB#2 1.00 -.84 -.66 - ,696 -.439
Set One
Time -.79 .65 .51 .534 .331
DB#2 1.00 -.73 -.76 - .535 -.573
Set Two
Time -.81 .67 SO ,571 ,321
DB#2 1.00 -.81 -.69 -.657 -.483

“Sig. < .Ol.

Since the journals sampled are more or less represen-
tative of their fields, and assuming that titles indeed
are the windows to the substance of articles, then all of
the fields represented have become more complex with
the passage of time. Why?
Rouquette (1976) found that 5,979 psychology article
titles in France between 1900 and 1969 showed a regu-
lar increase in size, except for the two World War peri-
ods. Several researchers (Bird & Knight, 1975; Buxton
& Meadows, 1977; Diener, 1984; Tocatlian, 1970) have
shown somewhat similar trends, though over a shorter
period of time, and with perhaps somewhat less distinc-
tive results.
One suggestion (Tocatlian, 1970) has been that the
development of computer data bases has produced an
increasing awareness on the part of authors of the im-
portance of key words. Another suggestion (Bird &
Knight, 1975) has been that longer titles have become
necessary to distinguish one article from another in an
ever increasingly crowded journal marketplace. These
and similar arguments are credible and reflect some of
the influences involved.

TABLE 3. DB#2 analysis of variance results for each of 18 journals.

Mean Squares

Journal/(Number of Blocks) Between Within F-Ratio

Set One
American Journal of Psychology (4) 104.987 3.910 26.621”
American Journal of Sociology (4) 66.890 12.212 5.477”
Economic Journal (4) 92.443 12.929 7.150”
Journal of Political Economy (4) 81.832 3.988 20.519”
Journal of Genetic Psychology (4) 239.897 5.278 45.449”
Journal of Educational Psychology (4) 143.100 1.649 86.795”
Social Casework (4) 93.086 5.693 16.350”
Journal of Educational Research (4) 96.079 2.507 38.318”
Education (4) 118.65 1 4.831 24.558”
Set Two
Journal of Counseling and Development (4) 82.967 6.174 13.438a
Journal of Social Psychology (4) 83.514 2.668 31.302”
Career Development Quarterly (4) 115.436 6.172 18.704”
Journal of College Student Development (4) 20.738 2.853 7.269”
Journal of Counseling Psychology (4) 138.533 5.017 27.610”
Counselor Education and Supervision (4) 48.538 3.076 15.780”
Set Three
Journal of Organizational Behavior (3) 3.130 8.170 0.383
Research in Higher Education (3) 0.003 2.332 0.001
Journal of Vocational Behavior (2) 4.463 3.005 1.485

“Sig. < .Ol.

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE-December 1991 733

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734 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE-December 1991