Characteristics of the Titles of Articles Published in Three Prominent Music Education Research Journals

The title is an important component of the manuscript, as it must convey sufficient information about the project to attract potential readers to engage further with the study. Researchers have examined titles and titling conventions in various disciplines, but not yet in music education. The purpose of this study was to provide a descriptive content analysis of characteristics of the titles of articles published from 1991 through 2021 in three prominent music education research journals published in the United States: Journal of Research in Music Education, Journal of Music Teacher Education, and Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education. In addition, we examined possible changes in title characteristics over time and the number of citations for articles published in 2014 with respect to selected title characteristics. The number of words per title ranged from four to 27, with an average of 12, and this has not changed much over the past 30 years. A majority of titles were descriptive, although there were small but notable increases over the past 10 years in proportions of declarative and interrogative titles. Title length was not associated with research method nor with the number of citations for articles published during the 1-year period examined.