I am unsure about how to capitalize the title of my dissertation. In my case, I am wondering about "testing" and "empirical":
Four Essays on the empirical testing of the Efficiency Hypothesis
Should I capitalize gerunds?
I am unsure about how to capitalize the title of my dissertation. In my case, I am wondering about "testing" and "empirical":
Four Essays on the empirical testing of the Efficiency Hypothesis
Should I capitalize gerunds?
The quickest solution (for me, at least), is to type in your title at https://capitalizemytitle.com. It gives correct title capitalization in many formal styles. And it has detailed information to explain the rules it follows.
Style guides vary, but generally, any word of any grammatical type that is four or five letters or longer is capitalized. (Different style guides differ on the four- or five-letter cut-off.)
For just about all style guides, "Testing" and "Empirical" are definitely capitalized.
I think there are three plausible options.
Four Essays on the Empirical Testing of the Efficiency Hypothesis
This is title case: you capitalise almost all words. The only words not capitalised will be things like articles, conjunctions and short prepositions (and perhaps some other words where a lower case initial letter is significant, e.g. "E. coli"). Exact rules vary, but "on", "of" and "the" would be lower case in all major versions.
Four essays on the empirical testing of the efficiency hypothesis
This is (normal) sentence case. In some disciplines, the titles of articles are usually in sentence case, and IMO it makes sense to do the same for theses in those disciplines.
Four essays on the empirical testing of the Efficiency Hypothesis
This is still sentence case, but regarding Efficiency Hypothesis as a proper noun. If you capitalise it when it appears in the text of your thesis, obviously you should also capitalise it in the title.
In particular, capitalising "Essays" but not "empirical testing" would be inconsistent.
I'm not a language maven, but I'd think that both Empirical and Testing should be capitalized. They seem to be especially important words in the title - the essence of it, actually. The work is about empirical testing, after all.
Some might ask you to capitalize all words in a title, even articles.
In a thesis, your advisor should have good advice.
the Efficiency Hypothesis
I doubt that's a good choice of phrase for a PhD title, regardless of capitalization. "efficiency" comes up everywhere. This is super-vague. At least somethin like "Smith's Efficiency Hypothesis" or "The [process name] efficiency Hypothesis" if that's the process you want to make efficient. Remember, the PhD title will be read not just by people in your specific subfield, but by people with very diverse backgrounds.