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Every word in your title is important. So the key is to devise a title that:

1. will immediately make sense to the referee

2. will easily be found by a search engine or indexing system

3. will attract the right kind of readers rather than discouraging them, and will also catch the

attention of browsers. Note ‘attraction’ does not mean resorting to newspaper-like head-
lines, but simply containing those words that readers in your field would expect to find

4. does not consist of a string of nouns and will be immediately comprehensible to anyone in

your general field
5. is reasonably short

6. has a definite and concise indication of what is written in the paper itself. It is neither unjus-
tifi ably specific nor too vague or generic

The rules for writing good titles reflect the rules on writing skills in Part 1 of this book.

Note that all the rules relating to titles given in this chapter are also valid for head-
ings, subheadings, and legends / captions. They are also valid for book titles and
chapter titles.

12.2 How can I generate a title? How long should it be?

Think about the following questions:

• Which of my findings will attract attention?

• What is new, different and interesting about my fi ndings?
• What are the 3–5 key words that highlight what makes my research and my

findings unique?
On the basis of your answers you should be able to formulate a title. If your paper
is not about results but proposes a particularly methodology, then your title should
encapsulate why your methodology is novel and useful.

Some research (see References for 12.2) has shown that 'journals which publish
papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper'. However, not all research-
ers have reached the same conclusion, and the best advice is probably to go for a
title of intermediate length.

Other research (see References for 12.2) has found that, in some fields, the amount
of humor in titles has increased over the years.
One thing everyone agrees on is that the title should be clear and understandable,
and be a true reflection of the content of the paper.