The evolution of sub-disciplinary linguistic trends

Abstract This study examines, from a diachronic stand, the linguistic features of research article titles in a particular journal in the specific field of experimental medical biology, and how the titling trends of this sub-disciplinary community have evolved over time. Following a corpus-based textual approach, we have compiled a corpus of 360 titles published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine over the period 1940–2023. We have mainly focused on the analysis of the length of titles, their prevalent syntactic structures, the types of information elements that they contain, the use of promotional lexical items, and their frequency of occurrence. The findings revealed an increasing trend to write longer titles with more complex syntactic structures and more persuasive information elements. The nominal types that were prevalent in the first decades, indicating the research topic and describing the methods, have been replaced in more recent decades by verbal constructions which also report on the most salient results and/or conclusions, whose relevance is emphasised by the use of persuasive lexical items (boosters and hyperbolic language). These findings point to a major shift over the last few decades towards an increasing promotional slant of academic titling practices in the sub-discipline of experimental medical biology.