Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

Six techniques for improving titles
Title: the face of your paper
Paper structure and purpose

1-Placement of contribution upfront in a title

As seen in the six titles reviewed so far, readers expect to see the contribution of a paper at the same place in each title: its beginning. The contribution is followed by the scope, the method, or the application (as in the example hereafter)

Self-installing substation for insular tidal-energy farms

The majority of the titles in print are incomplete sentences lacking a conjugated verb. In certain fields however (life sciences being one), the title is a full sentence with a conjugated verb.

When a title contains a conjugated verb, the contribution starts with the verb and continues until the end of the sentence (the sentence stress); otherwise, the contribution is stated upfront in the title.

“Glucocorticoid-induced thymocyte apoptosis is associated with endogenous endonuclease activation”⁵

The contribution is not that thymocyte apoptosis is induced by Glucocorticoid. This is an already known fact. The contribution is the association between apoptosis and endogenous endonuclease activation.

2-Addition of verbal forms

A title without a conjugated verb lacks energy. Nouns do not have the action-packed strength of a verb.

The gerundive and infinitive verbal forms add energy to a title without a conjugated verb.

“Data learning: understanding biological data”⁶

“Nonlinear Finite Element Simulation to Elucidate the Efficacy of Slit Arteriotomy for End-to-side Arterial Anastomosis in Microsurgery”⁷

3-Adjectives and numbers featuring qualitative or quantitative aspects of the contribution

Adjectives and adverbs are also used to attract — fast, highly efficient or robust. They enhance the contribution. Since adjectives are subjective, replacing them with something more specific is always better. A “100 MHz DCT processor” is clearer than a “fast DCT processor”; and while in twenty years “fast” will make a liar out of you, “100 MHz” will not. And by the way, avoid using ’new,’ ’novel,’ or ’first,’ which are not informative because a contribution should be new, novel and a first, anyway.

A 100 MHz 2-D 8 × 8 DCT/IDCT processor for HDTV applications⁸

4-Clear and specific keywords

Specific keywords attract the expert. The specificity of a paper is proportional to the number of specific keywords in its title. Beware of keywords buried in long modified nouns whose clarity is inversely proportional to the length of the modified noun. To clarify such nouns, add prepositions. You may lose in conciseness, but you certainly gain in clarity — the gain is greater than the loss.

“Transient model for kinetic analysis of electric-stimulus responsive hydrogels” (unclear)

“Transient model for kinetic analysis of hydrogels responsive to electric stimulus” (clear)

5-Smart choice of keyword coverage

Even published, an article has little impact if not found. Readers find new articles through online keyword searches; that is why choosing effective keywords is vital.

Keywords are divided into three categories ( 1).

General keywords (’simulation,’ ’model,’ ’chemical,’ ’image recognition,’ ’wireless network’) are useful to describe the domain, but they have little differentiating power precisely because they frequently appear in titles. They do not bring your title closer to the top of the list of retrieved titles. Intermediary keywords are better at differentiating. They are usually associated with methods common to several fields of research (’fast Fourier Transform,’ ’clustering,’ ’microarray’) or to large sub-domains (’fingerprint recognition’). But, for maximum differentiation, specific keywords are unbeatable (’Hyper surface,’ ’hop-count localization,’ ’non-alternative spliced genes’). For a given journal, or for domain experts, the category of a keyword is welldefined. It changes from journal to journal, or from experts to nonexperts. Polymer would be an intermediary keyword in the journal Nature, but it is definitely generic in the journal of Polymer Science.

Figure 1

Specialized keywords are at the pointed deep end of the inverted triangle. General keywords are at the broad top end of the triangle. The general to specific scale is correlated to the frequency of use of a scientific keyword. Depth and breadth of a keyword are not intrinsic qualities. They depend on the frequency of use of these words in the journal that publishes the paper. The reader’s knowledge also influences the perception of keyword levels: the less knowledgeable the reader is, the more general keywords seem specific.

Make sure your title has keywords at more than one level of the triangle. If too specific, your title will only be found by a handful of experts in your field; it will also discourage readers with a sizable knowledge gap. If too general, your title will not be found by experts, or will only pop up on page 5 of the search results. Decision on the keyword choice is yours. Base it on who you are writing your paper for.

If you are a known author pioneering the research in your field, someone readers follow through your announcements of publications on twitter, or someone whose articles are retrieved simply by searching by author name, citations, or references… If you are that someone, do not worry excessively about other people’s titles: you are the leader. But if that is not the case (yet), make sure your title has more than one keyword. People need keywords to find it.

6-Catchy attention-getting schemes

Catchy Acronym. The BLAST acronym is now a common word in bioinformatics. It started its life as five words in a title, “Basic Local Alignment Search Tool,” published in the 1990 Journal of Molecular Biology. The author built a fun and memorable acronym, and everyone remembered it. Acronyms provide a shortcut to help other writers refer to your work succinctly.

“Visor: learning VIsual Schemas in neural networks for Object Recognition and scene analysis”⁹

The title above is that of the doctoral thesis of Wee Kheng Leow. Other researchers mentioning his work could, for example, write “In the VISOR system [45]”. The acronym provides a convenient way for others to refer to his work. Notice that both BLAST and VISOR are memorable. Acronyms like GLPOGN are doomed to fail.

Question. The question makes a mighty hook. But journal editors rarely allow them. If you are bold enough to propose a question in your title, the answer must definitively be found in the paper. Yes, or no. No maybes or it depends.

“Software acceleration using programmable logic: is it worth the effort?”¹⁰

Words out of the expected range. Here is a catchy and intriguing title that relies on a simile.

“The Diner-Waiter pattern in Distributed Control”¹¹

“Distributed control” is not usually associated with the interaction between a restaurant waiter and a customer. What the title gains in interest, it loses in retrievability: it only has one general domain keyword, (“distributed control”) and researchers in this domain are unlikely to even think of “diner-waiter” as a search keyword. The next title has words out of the expected range that do not work cross-culture.

“The inflammatory macrophage: a story of Jekyll and Hyde”¹²

Would you understand this title if you were a researcher with a non-English background? Dr. Jekyll never published any papers, as far as I know. This title only makes sense if you have read the 1886 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.¹³

Besides these six popular techniques to improve titles, listed here without example are three more.

· Some keywords become buzzwords that carry the passion of our times. Seeing them in titles attracts the reader keen to keep up-to-date with the happenings in Science. For example, some buzzwords in 2020 included Deep Learning, Additive Manufacturing, and CRISPR-Cas9.

· A shorter title is more attractive than a long one, and a general title more attractive than a specific one.

· Words that announce the unexpected, the surprising, or the refutation of something well established, all fuel the curiosity of the reader.

To make a title catchy, there is one rule only: catchy, yes; dishonest, no.