Framing research in food science: the state of the art on research articles, short comminications and poster pesentatios

Abstract

Titles are the first point of contact with readers and are encoded to provideconcise information on the paper’s contents. Data from available surveys showthat the structural construction conforms to four different layouts, namelynominal, compound, full-sentence and question, with a prevalence of the formertwo formats and an increase in the use of the latter ones. The aim of this paper isto discuss the state of the art of title encoding practices in three written genrescommonly employed in Food Science: research articles, short communicationsand poster presentations. Findings indicate the prevalent occurrence of nominaland compound layouts and the lack of question titles in the three genresanalysed. Results also show that titles have a mean length of 15.3 words inresearch articles, of 14.6 words in short communications and of 12 words inposter presentations. The data are shared to offer a framework of current praxisin Food Science and to inform teachers and authors on how to shapeinformative titles for their research.