After analyzing 76,606 titles of the research articles published in Nature and Science between 1965 and 2020, we counted how many times each word (actually, we counted the word stem) was used in the titles.

The wordclouds show the most frequent words in 1965-1975 and in 2011-2020. Early in 1965, titles mentioning animals (rat, frog, mice, monkey, cat, chicken) were common. Interestingly, several titles back then utilized words such as Apollo, lunar, rock, and meteorite.

In recent years, titles often included words such genome, global, integration, regulation, and modulation. “Cell” is one word that was always highly present in titles!

These words are not clickbait but they definitely attract our attention.

Full data here: link.