Title

A title is the name of a document. Most publications contain today titles, why title is also an element of a document. Not all documents contain, however, titles. Typically contain letters and pictures no titles. Such documents may or may not have names, which are thus not parts of the documents. Some documents have no titles.   

"Parallel title" means the main title or complete title written in another language or script.

Crosby (1976) classified three hundred titles according to their apparent purpose in order to infer certain lessons for writers. The classification included:

(1)   Titles announcing the general subject, such as "The Age of Adolescence," & 

        "The Collective Corporation,"

(2)   Titles indicating a specific topic, including "The Decline of Courtesy," &

        "Toward a New Morality,"

(3)    Titles indicating the controlling question--some titles indicate the question that the

        writer is answering, & they go a long way to help the writer keep in focus—e.g.

        "Is Culture Worth While?," "How Can We Recover Our Joy?," &

(4)    Titles announcing the thesis, such as "This Thing Called Love is Pathological," &

        "The Rip-Off Age is the Clue to Nation's Ills."

(5)    Titles which bid for attention. Some methods of catching attention include

     (a) alliteration,

     (b) deliberate ambiguity,

     (c) intriguing word coupling,

     (d) allusions from serious & pop-culture, &

     (e) the twist, something unexpected.

Literature:

Barker, F. H.; Veal, D.C. & Wyatt, B. K. (1972). Comparative Efficiency of Searching Titles, Abstracts, and Index Terms in a Free-text Data Base. Journal of Documentation, 28(1),22-36.

Bernard, M.  1995.  A juste titre: A Lexicometric Approach to the Study of Titles.  Literary & Linguistic Computing, 10(2), 135-141. 

Buxton, A. B.; MEADOWS, A. J.  1977.  The Variation in the Information Content of Titles of Research Papers with Time and Discipline.  Journal of Documentation, 33(1), 46-52. 

Byrne, J. R. 1975.  Relative Effectiveness of Titles, Abstracts, and Subject Headings for Machine Retrieval from the COMPENDEX Services.  Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 26(4), 223-229.

Crosby, H. H.  (1976). Titles, A Treatise On. College Composition and Communication, 27(4), 387-391. 

Diodato, V.  (1982).  The Occurrence of Title Words in Parts of Research Papers: Variations Among Disciplines.  Journal of Documentation, 38(3), 192-206. 

Genette, G. (1988). Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature. Critical Inquiry, 14(4), 692-720. 

Hodges, P. R. (1983).  Keyword in Title Indexes. Special Libraries, 74(1), 56-60. 

Jeng, L. H. (1988). The language of a title page. IN: ASIS '88. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Volume 25, Atlanta, Georgia, 23-27 October 1988. Edited by Christine L. Borgman and Edward Y. H. Pai, Medford, New Jersey, Learned Information, Inc., for American Society for Information Science. (Pp. 31-35).

Myers, G. (1990). Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge.  Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Nahl-Jakobovits, D. & Jakobovits, L. A. (1987).  Teaching the Analysis of Titles: Dependent and Independent Variables in Research Articles.  Research Strategies, 5(4), 164-171. 

Peritz, B. (1984). On the informativeness of titles. International Classification, 11(2), 87-89.

Saracevic, T. (1969). Comparative Effects of Titles, Abstracts and Full Texts on Relevance Judgments 1.  In: North, J. B.  Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science: Volume 6; 1969 October 1-4; San Francisco, XX.  London, England: Greenwood Publishing Corp. (293-299). 

Voorbij, H. J.  1998.  Title Keywords and Subject Descriptors: A Comparison of Subject Search Entries of Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Journal of Documentation, 54(4), 466-476. 

Yitzhaki, M. (1992).  The Variation in informativity of [Titles of] Research Papers with Time and Field. In: Neelameghan, A.; Gopinath, M. A.; Raghavan, K. S.; Sankaralingam, P., eds.  Cognitive Paradigms in Knowledge Organization: Second International ISKO Conference, 1992 August 26-28.  Madras, India. Bangalore, India: Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science; 401-418. 

Yitzhaki, M. (1996).  Informativity of Journal Article Titles: The Ratio of "Significant" Words.  In: Ingwersen, Peter; Pors, Niels Ole, eds.  Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS): Integration in Perspective.  1996 October 13-16; Copenhagen, Denmark.  Copenhagen: The Royal School of Librarianship; 447-458.  

Yitzhaki, M. (1997). Variation in Informativity of Titles of Research Papers in Selected Humanities Journals: A Comparative Study.  Scientometrics, 38(2), 219-229. 

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 03-05-2006

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To be edited:,

Især monografier har udviklet en særlig standard omkring udformning af "titelblade", der er den plads i bogen, hvoraf den officielle titel fremgår.

Et navn kan - men behøver ikke - karakterisere den navngivne genstand. (Erik er ikke en karakteristik for personer med dette navn, men "Erik den Røde" er). Det er almindeligt, at dokumenters titler indeholder information, der karakteriserer dokumenternes indhold, men dette er mere udpræget i nogle epoker, kulturer og fag end i andre. Titelgivning er således en kulturel proces, som man må have kendskab til, hvis man skal forstå titlers mulighed som *emnedata. Sandsynligvis bevirker mulighederne for titelsøgning, at forfattere er blevet mere opmærksomme på titlers informative værdi og lægger større vægt på at udnytte denne. Ofte anvendes imidlertid titler f.eks. med metaforisk betydning, hvilket er hæmmende for en rent søgemæssig betragtning.

Peritz (1984)undersøger hyppigheden af non-informative titler i henholdsvis "library and information science" og i sociologi artikler fra periodica. Andelen af non-informative artikler var 21% i førstnævnte område og 15% i det andet. For begge områder gjaldt, at de non-informative artikler var koncentreret i nogle få tidsskrifter.

Fordi titler har forskellig informativ værdi, anvender nogle *bibliografier (f.eks. den pædagogiske ERIC) titler som registerinformation under opslagsordet, mens andre bibliografier (f.eks. Psychological Abstracts & New York Times) anvender en konstrueret frase med en højere informationsværdi.

Der findes mange former for titler: f.eks. hovedtitler, undertitler, bindtitler, alternative titler og parallel titler. Forfatters og udgivers navn er almindeligvis ikke en del af dokumentets titel, men kan være det.

Begrebet titel anvendes også i daglig tale synonymt for de dokumenter eller bibliografiske enheder, som de er navn for. "Biblioteket rummer 10.000 titler".