By James Hartley
In an earlier blog (SRHE News, April 2017) I reported that the titles of articles in the field of higher education fell into three categories – ones with colons (60%), ones with statements (30%) and ones with questions (10%). In this blog I note that the dearth of titles written in the form of questions is much more common than I thought.
Table 1 below shows the numbers (and percentages) of titles written in the form of questions in an assortment of publications and disciplines. (Further details are provided in Hartley 2018a, b, and Hartley and Morgan, 2018.)
It can be seen, with this sample of 950 titles, that only 77 (8%) of them were written in the form of questions. Even this figure, however, is much higher than the 2.3% reported by Cook and Plourde (2016), who studied 7,845 such titles in sixty academic journals.
Table 1. The numbers (and percentages) of recent article or book titles with question marks.
| Source | No of titles | No of titles with ?s | % |
| New Scientist | 48 | 8 | 17 |
| London Review of Books | 57 | 0 | 0 |
| Times Literary Supplement | 48 | 8 | 17 |
| Psychology PhD Theses | 100 | 6 | 6 |
| Psychology Journals | 380 | 23 | 6 |
| History Journals | 187 | 31 | 17 |
| Postscript (a book catalogue) | 130 | 1 | 0.76 |
| Overall | 950 | 77 | 8 |
Titles with questions can frequently be answered ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or (more typically in Education and Psychology) ‘it all depends’. In the field of journalism Betteridge (2009) postulated a witty law that stated that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘No’” (Betteridge, 2009). This, however, is not the case here. Indeed, Cook & Plourde (2016) reported in their study of such titles in academic articles that most of them were more often answered with a “Yes” rather than a “No”.
Posing a question in the title is often seen as a way of drawing the readers’ attention to the issue in hand. I find it surprising that it is not done more often. Any comments?
SRHE member James Hartley is emeritus professor, School of Psychology, Keele University.
References
Betteridge, I (2009) ‘TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism’ Technovia.com
http://www.technovia.co.uk/2009/02/techcrunch-irresponsible-journalism.hml.
Cook, JM and Plourde, D (2016) ‘Do scholars follow Betteridge’s Law? The use of questions in journal article titles’ Scientometrics 108: 1119-1128
Hartley, J (2017) ‘What works for you? The choice of titles for academic articles in higher education’ SRHE News, April 2017: 19-22
Hartley, J (2018a) ‘Are psychologists afraid of asking questions?’ (Paper available from the author.)
Hartley, J (2018b) ‘Choosing a title for your thesis. What are the most frequent formats?’ (Paper available from the author.)
Hartley, J and Morgan P (2018) ‘Are historians afraid of posing questions? The titles of articles in history journals’ (Paper available from the authors.)
