How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Importance of the title
How to prepare the title
Preparing the text

First impressions are strong impressions; a title ought therefore to be well studied, and to give, so far as its limits permit, a definite and concise indication of what is to come.

—T. Clifford Allbutt

Importance of the title

In preparing a title for a paper, you would do well to remember one salient fact: This title will be read by thousands of people. Perhaps few people, if any, will read the entire paper, but many people will read the title, either in the original journal, in one of the secondary (abstracting and indexing) databases, in a search engine’s output, or somewhere else. Therefore, all the words in the title should be chosen with great care, and their association with one another must be carefully managed. Perhaps the most common error in defective titles, and certainly the most damaging one in terms of comprehension, is faulty syntax (word order).

What is a good title? We define it as the fewest possible words that adequately describe the contents of the paper.

Remember that the indexing and abstracting services depend heavily on the accuracy of the title, as do individual computerized literature-retrieval systems. An improperly titled paper may be virtually lost and never reach its intended audience.

Some authors mistakenly sacrifice clarity in an attempt to be witty. The title of a paper need not, and generally should not, be clever. It must, however, be clear. An example (adapted from Halm and Landon 2007): “Association Between Diuretic Use and Cardiovascular Mortality” could be an adequate title. The authors of this paper should resist the temptation to use instead “Dying to Pee.”