You have probably noticed that a high fraction of scientific papers have colons in their titles. Several people have written humorous commentaries on this. Although these authors clearly see the use of colons as a growing trend, they did not present hard evidence for the increase in the usage of colons in the titles of scientific publications.
Out of curiosity, I thus wrote a small script to count the fraction of papers in Medline that have colons in their titles for each of the past 25 years. The result is shown in the plot below (note that the y-axis does not start at zero):
The conclusion is very clear: the fraction of titles with colons has increased linearly from 15% to 24% over the past 20 years. One could object that this effect may be explained by the increase in apologies (which often have a title “Retraction: “) or by the NAR special issues on databases and web servers (which contain hundreds papers with titles such as “YADB: yet another database”). However, these add up to less than 2% of the papers with colonized titles and are thus insufficient to explain the observed 9% increase.
A good database lets you answer questions that never occurred to the database creators. Why colons are increasing is a mystery but one that might be fun to answer. It is amazing that the curve is so linear for 25 years. Searching Medline is a nice way to discover interesting things about how scientists think. I never would have believed that close to 25% of the papers have a colon in their title.
Technorati Tags: Bioinformatics, Science
