Colons in computer science paper titles

1953 to present, as indexed by DBLP

McGill University’s txtLAB blog posted an article earlier this week plotting the proportion of academic papers in the field of literary studies that have a colon in the paper title, from 1950 to 2010. In the txtLAB analysis, colons start out being used in about 15% of literary-studies article titles in the early 1950s, a proportion that thereafter grows nearly linearly: 30% by the late 1960s, 40% by 1975, 50% by 1985, then leveling out from the mid-1990s to settle at the current proportion, which is around 60%. The trend in computer science has gone through more ups and downs, and the absolute proportion of articles using colons in their titles has been far lower throughout.

Source: www.kmjn.org