Paterson

Executive Summary

Lincoln Paterson, CSIRO Petroleum

In the March issue I provided some analysis of author patterns in the SPE Journal. Electronic cataloguing also allows for easy lexicographic analysis of paper titles. Here, I examine 234 titles in SPEJ from the period September 2000 to December 2004. The frequency spectrum of the number of words per title is shown in Fig. 1. The shortest title is four words, the longest is 22 words, and the mean is 10.9 words. Despite 11 words being nearest the mean, titles of 11 words are actually underrepresented and the mode is nine words.  Note that I have treated hyphenated words as separate words.

Fig. 1 here

How does this compare with the other SPE technical journals? The result is shown in Fig. 2. Titles in SPEJ are slightly shorter than in the other journals; this coincides with the average number of authors being slightly lower (see the figure in the March issue).

Fig. 2 here

Which words are used more frequently? For the period analyzed, Table 1 gives the number of times the most frequent words are used in titles. What is of interest is the exceptional use of the word "of." In general text normally the word "the" is the most frequent word, but around half of all SPEJ titles use "of." Looking at the nouns and verbs gives a clear guide to the main themes of this journal. Together "model", "modeling", and "models" are used 53 times; "reservoir" and "reservoirs" 47 times; "well" and "wells" 33 times; and "data", "permeability", "phase", “oil”, "water", and "gas" all get good usage. Over the same period there are 412 words only appearing once, reflecting the breadth to the topic material.

Table 1 here

In the June issue we have the journal’s mainstream themes represented, with three papers using "wellbore" in the title, three with "oil", three using "model" or "modeling", two with "reservoir", and again that word "of" gets a good workout. Again we have a variety of topics; I hope you can find some in your area of interest.

Finally, for this issue I warmly welcome Aly Hamonda to the editorial board and give thanks to Gary Jenneman, Jairam Kamath, and Mary Wheeler, who have retired after giving excellent service.

Fig. 1—Frequency chart of the length of titles in SPEJ, September 2000 to September 2004.

Fig. 2—Average length of titles for the four SPE technical journals compared.