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

The title as label
How to prepare the title
Preparing the text

The title of a paper is a label. It normally is not a sentence. Because it is not a sentence, with the usual subject-verb-object arrangement, it is simpler than a sentence (or, at least, shorter), but the order of the words becomes even more important.

Actually, a few journals do permit a title to be a sentence. An example of such a title: “Babbling in a Vocal Learning Bat Resembles Human Infant Babbling” (Fernandez et al. 2021). One might object to such a title because presence of a verb (in this case, resembles) makes the title seem like a loud assertion. Such a title may sound dogmatic because we are not accustomed to seeing authors present their results in the present tense, for reasons that are discussed in Chapter 30. Rosner (1990, p. 108) gave the name “assertive sentence title (AST)” to this kind of title and presented a number of reasons why such titles should not be used. In particular, ASTs are “improper and imprudent” because “in some cases the AST boldly states a conclusion that is then stated more tentatively in the summary or elsewhere” and “ASTs trivialize a scientific report by reducing it to a one-liner.”

The meaning and order of the words in the title are important to the potential reader who sees the title in the journal table of contents. But these considerations are equally important to all potential users of the literature, including those (probably a majority) who become aware of the paper via secondary sources. Thus, the title should be useful as a label accompanying the paper itself, and it also should be in a form suitable for the machine-indexing systems used by Chemical Abstracts, MEDLINE, and others. In short, the terms in the title should be those that highlight the significant content of the paper.

As an aid to readers, journals commonly print running titles or running heads at the top of each page. Often the title of the journal or book is given at the top of left-facing pages and the article or chapter title is given at the top of right-facing pages (as in this book). Usually, a short version of the title is needed because of space limitations. (The maximum character count is likely to be stated in the journal’s instructions to authors.) It can be wise to suggest an appropriate running title on the title page of the manuscript.