Evaluation of Hard/Soft Sciences and Disciplinary/Interdisciplinary Divides in Light of Titles in Persian and English Research Articles

The hard/soft as well as disciplinary/interdisciplinary divides have been interesting topics in the history and philosophy of science. In this study, these two divides will be revisited in the light of the sub-genre, "article title". The article title is the initial section of any article that readers encounter and decide whether they continue to follow the text. To conduct the study, 6000 article titles (3000 Persian and 3000 English titles) published in peer-reviewed and ISI journals in 12 disciplines and interdisciplinaries have been collected and their length as well as the frequency of three punctuation marks, i.e. colon (:), comma (,) and question mark (?) are counted. It is revealed that 72281 words make the whole corpus with 12 words as average for each title. The Persian titles are reported longer than English ones, whereas the frequency of three punctuation marks is higher in English corpus. The results indicate that the research article titles have become longer during years and decades both in Persian and English. In sum, the findings confirm that the previous scholars' position on the rigidness of hard/soft as well as disciplinary/interdisciplinary divides are also acceptable in sub-genres such as article titles.