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

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

Occasionally, titles are too short. A paper was submitted to the Journal of Bacteriology with the title “Studies on Brucella.” Obviously, such a title was not very helpful to the potential reader. Was the study taxonomic, genetic, biochemical, or medical? We would certainly want to know at least that much.

Much more often, titles are too long. Ironically, long titles are often less meaningful than short ones. Over a century or so ago, when science was less specialized, titles tended to be long and nonspecific, such as, “On the addition to the method of microscopic research by a new way of producing colour-contrast between an object and its background or between definite parts of the object itself” (Rheinberg J. 1896. J. R. Microsc. Soc. 373). That certainly sounds like a poor title; perhaps it would make a good abstract.

Not only scientists have written rambling titles. Consider this one from the year 1705: A Wedding Ring Fit for the Finger, or the Salve of Divinity on the Sore of Humanity with directions to those men that want wives, how to choose them, and to those women that have husbands, how to use them. Ironically, this title appeared on a miniature book (Bernard 1995).

Without question, most excessively long titles contain “waste” words. Often, these waste words—such as “Studies on,” “Investigations on,” and “Observations on”—appear at the start of the title. An opening A, An, or The is also a waste word. Certainly, such words are useless for indexing purposes.