(243) You Are What You Title: Learning About Ourselves through Pharmacy Education Manuscript Titles

Objective : To describe the characteristics of titles used in select pharmacy education publications over 5 years as a means to understand how we capture readers’ attention and signal the intent of our scholarly work.

Methods: Titles appearing in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education and Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning from January 2018 to December 2022 were extracted. Letters, erratum, and corrigendum were excluded, as were association/editor reports and annual meeting proceedings. We investigated title length, and first word frequency. The frequency of articles (‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’) and words ending in “ing” as first words was inspected.

Results: A total of 1,886 article titles were included. Title length ranged from 2-29, with a median title length of 13 words (eg, the number of words in this abstract’s title). A total of 690 unique first-words appeared. The 12 most frequent unique first words accounted for over 25 % of titles (ie, ‘impact’, ‘pharmacy’, ‘evaluation’, ‘student’, ‘implementation’, ‘development’, ‘assessment’, ‘using’, ‘use’, ‘assessing’, ‘design’, ‘comparison’). Articles appeared first in 17.6% of titles, while ‘ing’ words were first 14.8% of the time.

Conclusions: Our titles are the gateway to our manuscripts; our words matter. Many different first words are used, yet a small number of words and word types comprise a large portion of titles. Common first words suggest investigators focus largely on action (eg, “ing”, like using, developing) or results (eg, assessment, impact), which aligns with a teacher-scholar perspective and a desire to report our teaching work. However, scholarly activity oriented around discovery or student learning were less frequently signaled by first words.