A Linguistic Analysis of Petroleum-Related English Research Article Titles

Research article titles constitute a special type of text - concise, clear, and informative. The specificity of article titles is determined by a number of factors such as the object of research, the author’s personal style, academic tradition, the field of study among them. Today, article titles from different scientific areas are in the focus of scientific attention. This article presents the results of a linguistic analysis aimed at determining similarities and differences of research article titles from journals on petroleum science. The theoretical value has the descriptive analysis of technical article titles which can further be compared with titles from other areas of research. According to the obtained results, the titles were 15 words on average. The overwhelming majority (98%) of the titles had a nominative character; 2% were subject-predicate sentences, mainly, interrogative. Words were seven characters long, on average. Nouns, function words and adjectives were the most frequently occurred word classes; on the contrary, numerals, adverbs and verbs - the least frequent words. The most common punctuation marks were hyphens, commas, and colons, indicating the complexity of technical terms, enumeration and elaboration of the object of research and geography of petroleum sites. Names of petroleum reservoirs, formations and basins with their location specification, multisyllabic professional terms and abbreviations, constituting 30% of the article titles’ lengths on the average, can be considered special features of article titles on petroleum science. For this reason, a long title is typical of petroleum-related research articles. Additionally, more articles were devoted to richer petroleum reserves.