Academia Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for academics and those enrolled in higher education. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
What are the best practices for writing a research paper title? I am looking for some general guidelines.
Follow the conventions of your target journal or conference. The most reliable predictor of how a title will be perceived is if other papers at the same venue have had similar titles.
Specifically, your question Are titles written different for different areas of research? can be answered with a clear yes. For example, compare the following programming languages and neuro-imaging venues.
For every person who reads the whole of a scientific paper, about 500 read only the title . One way to improve this statistic could be to make the title declarative by including what the paper says, not just what it covers. Gustavii, B. (2008). How to Write and Illustrate Scientific Papers (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
I always been told to use declarative rather then neutral/descriptive title but seems that the following article shows the opposite: Jamali, H.R. and Nikzad, M. (2011). Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations, Scientometrics, 88 (2):653-661
I'll use it to answer to your question with the support of real data.
Q: Does one go with short and sweet? Or a bit longer and informative?
A: Articles with longer titles are downloaded slightly less than the articles with shorter titles.
Q: Should one phrase it as a question or rather as a statement?
A: There are differences between articles with different types of titles in terms of downloads and citations, especially articles with question titles tend to be downloaded more but cited less than the others.
Q: Should one use humour and play on words?
A: some authors hypothesize that "humorous titles communicate a non-serious subject matter, and as found previously in experimental settings harm the credibility of the paper"Journal of Information Science, 34 (5) 2008, pp. 680–687
Q: What should one avoid?
In my opinion: one should avoid abbreviations, and to put the keywords at the end of the titles.
Q: Are the titles written different for different areas of research?
I think common sense is not specifically related to any discipline.
(Disclaimer: Quite subjective point of view, based on my experience more than any kind of reference or "authority". Ph.D student here, Computer Science, ML & NLP)
- Are titles written different for different areas of research? (i.e. Computer Science, Maths, Neuroscience etc.)
I've no evidence about it, but I'm pretty sure it will be way different. Thus, my background might influence me a lot.
- Should one phrase it as a question or rather as a statement?
- Should one use humour and play on words?
I would say without hesitation, to me, humour has to be banned, and you should use a statement. You publish to give answer, not question. Question might be present at the end of your work to introduce what question does your work open, what are the next step. Still, I will be statement like "we may wonder what would...." (no "?" involved, you are wondering, not asking).
- Does one go with short and sweet?
- Or a bit longer and informative?
Here's the trap: it has to be short and informative. You have to tease future reader by telling him "I managed (or kind of) to do this, that way, it rocks right?".
This part will probably be the trickiest as you need to make people feel close to your research by showing what you work on, while not being too specific otherwise they will say "wow what's that?".
As a thumb rule, for a random paper (random = no hype = didn't read about it previously, no one told me to read it, I don't know/notice who wrote it), I will be interested if: the goal interests me or if the method interests me. Lets say if I'm interested about cars: Making faster car or Using cars for food delivery.
Personaly what I see most is:
[WHAT I DID] <separator > [HOW DID I DO IT ], usually to present a solution to a general problem
[WHAT I USED] [WHAT FOR], using well known techniques for a context specific use or something not initially studied
[MY PRODUCT]: [DESCRIPTION], introduce a named product/innovation.
[WHAT I DID], when something is really new. Usually impressive work.
Hope it helps, do not hesitate to comment, suggest edits etc. I find this discussion interesting and my really new to academic world, give me feedback!
pltrdy
As with all communication, the key is to consider your aims and your audience. Your aim, I presume, is to get your paper read. Certain people will read it no matter what the title - mainly, those who work in very similar areas. Your most important audience is therefore people who know a little about your subject area (those in exactly your field will read it no matter what) who are scanning through a list of paper titles (either from a journal or a keyword search). We come across far too many papers to read them all, you want people to pause when they see your title. Think about what might make you stop to read further if you were scanning down a list of papers.
On that basis:
Be as clear as possible. Minimise jargon and use simple phrasing. If I can't understand the title at first glance, I'm not going to read it again.
You should aim to get attention within the first few words. That might sound dramatic, but I suspect that lots of people won't even read the whole title if it doesn't look relevant or interesting. So try to put your most important key word/phrase in the first few words.
Personally I don't see much disadvantage with having a long title per se, but you need to make sure that the first phrase can stand on its own. So quite a few titles follow something along the lines of "[Interesting discovery]: using [method] to address [question]".
Being creative/humorous/unusual might make people stop and look twice if you can pull it off well. But realistically, drawing people in this way may not be especially constructive: if they wouldn't have read your abstract but for the intriguing title, chances are that they won't end up reading any further than that. If you're going down this route, you certainly need to make sure that you don't sacrifice informativeness.
