Wordiness of paper titles in life and medical science journals

Question

I do research in the life and medical sciences. If I want to publish in one of the major journals (Cell, Nature *, etc.), would I have to confine a title to something short and snappy, or can I be more verbose so that my title conveys better the output of the research?

For example, is this sort of structure:

XXX and YYY are AAA and BBB in PPP and QQQ, respectively

too wordy?

PD. I'm not sure if this was the right forum on the stackexchange network, so please feel free to suggest some other site to post.

Answer 1

Copy the pattern that is used most common in your target journal.

Look through a couple of dozen articles. What's the median word-count in titles? Do a majority have colons, or not?

Answer 2

When I wrote my first paper, I read this book about scientific writing: "Scientific Writing = Thinking in Words" by David Lindsay.

The author of the book highlighted that article title should be as explicit on the content of the article as possible, as it is the first element any potential reader will read. As today the amount of available articles is growing faster, the skimming step in the article research is becoming more and more important and a good, self-explanatory title is therefore a key element in article "success".

As an example, the author strongly discourage the use of non-explicit title such as:

XXX as an effect on YYY

and advice to use something more like:

Increase in XXX induce a decrease in YYY

which directly tells the reader what is the article about and the what is its main finding.

In conclusion, do not be afraid of wordy title.