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

Title Q&A
Title: the face of your paper
Paper structure and purpose

Q: When do I write my title?

A: There is no set time. You may write a tentative title as soon as you identify something is novel and useful enough to merit publication. An early title gives focus to your work. As your research progresses, you may decide to change your title to include new findings. But you may also discover new elements that, on their own, represent sufficient contribution to merit their own paper. How would you know which route to take? Two papers may be better if your title gets longer when you try to bring in everything together. But if your title becomes shorter, and more general, you may have a better, more attractive paper. General or generic titles should not be abused, however. It is better to have a string of published short papers than to have an unpublished paper with a generic title covering a shapeless amalgam of new research tidbits.

Q: Should I look at other titles in my list of references before or after I write my final title?

A: Your final title should have all the qualities mentioned in this chapter, and not be influenced by other people’s titles — apart from making sure your title is unique. This said, while looking at the titles of related papers, you may discover that the most highly cited papers use a particular keyword, whereas you use a synonymous keyword also often found. It may be advantageous to use instead the one found in the title of the highly cited papers so that when their titles are retrieved, your title is retrieved alongside theirs.

Q: When two keywords are synonymous, which one do I choose for my title?

A: From what we have seen before, the most frequent one should be chosen. When two different keywords with the same meaning appear with the same frequency in titles, choose one for the title and abstract and put the other in the keyword list. That way, search engines will find your paper, regardless of the keyword used for the search.

Q: Is it appropriate to mention the impact of the contribution in a title?

A: “Multiple reflections of Lamb waves at a delamination” is the title of a paper by T. Hayashi and Koichiro Kawashima.¹⁴ After reading the paper, scientists who attended the writing skills seminar suggested to rewrite the title to depict more precisely what the paper contains. Here is their proposed title:

Multiple reflections of Lamb waves for rapid measurement of delamination.

Note the addition of ’rapid measurement’. What attracted the readers, the research impact, was absent from the title. Yes, the title is longer, but also more attractive.

Q: Isn’t it better to keep the title general so that it attracts a maximum of readers?

A: The following title of a paper by B. Seifert et al., published in the artificial organs journal (Volume 26 Issue 2, Pages 189—199) is a typical title with two parts separated by punctuation. It emphasizes the name of the polymer and its novelty in membrane-forming.

“Polyetherimide: A New Membrane-Forming Polymer for Biomedical Applications”

The terms ’biomedical applications’ is general, maybe too much so for a journal dealing with biomedical applications anyway. The indefinite article ’a,’ is general and non-descriptive: it means ’one of many’. ’New’ is going to be obsolete very soon. ’Membrane’ is also a general term. Membranes are of many types and have many properties. Here is how the readers of this paper proposed to change its title to make it more specific and yet more attractive:

Polyetherimide: A biocompatible polymer to form anti-fouling membranes

They added a hot keyword ’Biocompatible,’ and they characterized the membrane property with ’anti-fouling’. The title now includes a dynamic verb (’to form’) enhancing its appeal.

Q: I agree that a short title is better than a long one, but how does one go from a long title to a short title?

A: The following title of a paper by Cook BL, Ernberg KE, Chung H, Zhang S, published in the PLoS One. 2008 Aug 6;3(8) is long:

“Study of a synthetic human olfactory receptor 17—4: expression and purification from an inducible mammalian cell line”

Look out for words such as ’study of,’ or ’investigation of’. You can safely remove them. ’a’ is not attractive, and misleading because in this case, there is only one such receptor. Readers of the article rewrote the title to make it concise by removing what they considered an unimportant and unproductive search keyword (the Mammalian cell line).

Purifying the synthetic human olfactory receptor 17—4 in milligram quantities

The readers placed the outstanding contribution right upfront in the title, in verb form to make the title more attractive, and they added the outcome of the contribution at the end of the title.

Q: What are the consequences of changing the keywords in my title?

A: Here are two alternative titles for a same paper written by Dr. Linda Y.L. Wu, A.M. Soutar and X.T. Zeng, and published in Surface and Coatings Technology, 198(1—3), pp. 420—424 (2005).

“Increasing hydrophobicity of sol-gel hard coatings by chemical and morphological modifications”

“Increasing hydrophobicity of sol-gel hard coatings by mimicking the lotus leaf morphology”

The second title is quite catchy. Only one keyword describing the methodology was lost (’chemical modification’). ’Lotus leaf’ is unexpected. That keyword may attract scientists outside the domain of manufacturing technology, and even journalists writing for widely distributed science magazines. The author of this paper, Dr. Linda Wu, decided to keep the first title even though the second title was indeed attractive. Why? The journal she targeted with her title was “Surface and Coating Technologies”. Its readers have a chemical and material science background, not biology. Had she chosen the ’lotus leaf’ title, she would have attracted a more general audience to her paper. As a result, she would have had to rewrite the whole paper, change its structure (emphasis on morphology and biomimicry), and simplify the vocabulary (simpler terms understandable by a larger group of non-experts).

Q: If I submit a paper to different journals, do I need to change the title?

A: First, if you write a paper, it is for one journal. Look at the web page of the journal you are targeting. It specifically mentions the type of contents the journal covers. Each journal attracts different types of readers in terms of expertise. Therefore, each paper is written for the specific readers of a specific journal. A paper cannot possibly be written the same way for two different journals. Not only should your title change, but also the contents of the paper.

Also, one should not send the same paper to two journals at the same time. Submission should be a serial process. Pick one journal. If that journal decides not to publish you or if you feel that the journal’s lengthy review process (due in part to a reviewer’s attitude towards your paper) delays important results from being published, submit it to another journal — after reworking its contents and title to match the readers’ interests.

Q: In the role of the title for the writer, you write “[the title] catches the attention of the reader targeted by the writer”. Why should the writer target anyone? Isn’t the reader the one identifying the target according to his or her needs?

A: Your impact will be negligible if you do not have in mind the reader who can make use of your contribution. What keywords is this reader looking for? Are they in your title? These keywords usually describe the impact or the application domain. In a precedent title, the words ’in milligram quantities’ were added to the title by the readers themselves, as they thought this was very significant and opened many new applications. In another title the words ’rapid measurement’ were added by readers, again reflecting the same concern to present real solutions to real problems faced by the scientists in this field. Put yourself in the shoes of your reader, and if space allows, find a way to mention the outcome of your contribution in the title of your paper.

Q: In a previous chapter you mentioned that adjectives make claims and are therefore dangerous to use in a scientific paper. But in this chapter you write that adjectives are attractive. Isn’t there a contradiction here?

A: Precisely, the eye-catching adjectives make claims. But so does any title. It should not be astonishing to find an adjective such as ’robust,’ ’efficient,’ or ’fast’ in a title. Once the claim is made, the writer is expected to provide early justification for that claim in the abstract, even if the justification is only partial.

Q: When one writes a title, what are the advantages and drawbacks for being first in a field?

A: The advantage is clear. If you are a pioneer in your field, the choice of words is entirely yours. Since you are the first to write in this field, you need not worry about titles that may already have been used. Think about it. Imagine being the first to write about dialogue in speech recognition. Finding a title is easy: “Dialogue in speech recognition”. Nice and short. Now imagine you are writer 856 with a paper in this crowded field. You have to be much more specific to differentiate your title from all the others. As a result, you might have to settle for a long specific title like “semantic-based model for multi phase parsing of spontaneous speech in dialogue systems”

Being first gives you the opportunity to have a shorter title… that won’t be found! You are a pathfinder. At first, people may not find you through the possibly new keyword you introduce (the name you gave to a new polymer, for example), because they are not yet aware of it. This is why you want to make sure your title is found by including other well-known keywords. Alternatively, if you are already famous, you need not care. People find you by name, not through the keywords of your papers.

Q: What evidence supports your claim that you should place what is novel upfront in the title?

A: Eye tracking studies, studying how people search through lists, have identified that people spend more time reading the beginning of each item in a list than the end of that item. Often, when the beginning does not capture the attention, the rest of the list item is simply skipped and the reader moves to the next line. So if you put what is interesting at the end of your long title, the reader may not even get to it.