SYNTACTIC FEATURES OF RESEARCH ARTICLE TITLES PUBLISHED IN REPUTABLE INTERNATIONAL JOURNALS OF DIFFERENT QUARTILE VALUES IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

A title is an essential part of a research article that must consider. The title
should be clear, easy to understand to impress the reader. This study aims
to find the average length of RA titles, the syntactic features, and the
differences in research article titles in applied linguistics published in
reputable international journals at different quartile values. The method
employed is descriptive qualitative to discover and describe the data. The
total number was eighty research article titles taken from eight journals at
different quartile values. The first result indicates that the average length of
RA titles was 12.3. It may imply that the authors want to address more
research focuses in the title to attract readers' attention. The second result
indicates that the compound feature became the most dominant syntactic
feature typically used in reputable international journals at different quartile
values in applied linguistics. Using compound features in writing the
research article titles into two sections can make it easier for the readers
to find out the keywords of the study. The third result indicates that the
higher the quartile value of the journal, the more compound feature used.
In contrast, the higher the quartile value of the journal, the lower the
nominal feature was used. The findings of this study imply that students
should be familiar with the length of words and the syntactic features for
writing the titles to construct them for publication. Exciting and informative
titles are more likely to be read and accepted for publication.
Keywords: syntactic features, research article titles, reputable
international journals, quartile value, applied linguistics