Author: Greetings, Mr Scientist. I’d like to introduce a series of six titles and ask you one or two questions about each one. These titles may be in areas you are not familiar with, but I’m sure you’ll do fine. Are you ready?
Scientist: By all means, go ahead!
Author: All right then. Here is the first title.
“Gas-assisted powder injection moulding (GAPIM)”a Based on its title, is this paper specific or general?
Scientist: Hmm, you are right, I know nothing about powder injection moulding. The title seems halfway between being specific and being general. “Powder injection moulding” by itself would be general, maybe a review paper. But, this title is a little more specific. It says “Gas-assisted”, which seems to indicate that there are other ways to do powder injection moulding.
Author: You are right. GAPIM is used to make hollow ceramic parts. People in that field would be quite familiar with powder injection moulding and its PIM acronym. What would have made the title more specific?
Scientist: The author could have mentioned a new specific application for GAPIM.
aLi Q, William K, Pinwill IE, Choy CM, and Zhang S, “Gas-assisted powder injection moulding (GAPIM)”, International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies (ICMAT 2001), Symposium C: Novel and Advanced Ceramic Materials, Singapore, 2001.
Author: Good. How do you feel about the use of the GAPIM acronym in the title?
Scientist: I am not sure it is necessary. I have seen acronyms in titles before, but they were used to launch a name for a new system, a new tool, or a new database. The acronym was usually more memorable than the long modified name it replaced. Unless this is the first article ever published on this technology, in my opinion, it is not necessary to use an acronym. Author: Thank you. How about this second title: general or specific?
“Energy-efficient data gathering in large wireless sensor networks”b Scientist: This title is very specific. It mentions the domain “wireless sensor networks”, and makes it even more specific by adding the adjective “large”. The contribution seems clear: “energy-efficient”. This adjective hints that data gathering is not energy-efficient when the network is large. I know nothing in this domain either, but it seems to make sense.
Author: You are perfectly entitled to logically infer that from the title. Actually, all readers generate hypotheses and expectations from titles. How about these two titles: are they both claiming the same thing?
“Highly efficient waveguide grating couplers using silicon-on- insulator”
“Silicon-on-insulator for high-output waveguide grating couplers” Scientist: Well, I suppose the first paper is mostly about waveguide grating couplers, and the second about Silicon-on-insulator. What comes first in the title, usually the author’s contribution, is the most important information. bLu KZ, Huang LS, Wan YY, and Xu HL, “Energy-efficient data gathering in large wireless sensor
networks”, Second International Conference on Embedded Software and Systems (ICESS’05), Xi’an, China, pp. 327–331, 2005.
Author: Bravo! You are doing fine. Now, look at the following two titles. Besides the use of an em dash or a colon to introduce the benefit of web services, are these two titles equivalent?
“Web services — an enabling technology for trading partners com- munity virtual integration”c
“Web services: integrating virtual communities of trading partners” Scientist: Um … this is a difficult one. The long five-word modified noun in the first title is difficult to read, yet I am attracted by the catchy term “enabling technology”. The second title does not have the problems of the first. It is shorter, more dynamic, and purposeful. But, is it necessary to put a colon after “web services”? The second part of the title does not really explain or illustrate web services. Could the title be changed to “Integrating virtual communities of trading partners through web services”? In this way, what is new comes at the beginning of the title. I don’t think that web services are really new.
Author: The title could be changed to what you propose. You are right; the second title is more dynamic. The use of the verbal form “inte- grating” makes it so. You are doing very well. Only two more titles.
“Vapor pressure assisted void growth and cracking of polymeric films and interfaces”d
Scientist: Vapor with an “o”. It is for an American journal, isn’t it? If it had been for a British paper, they would have written “vapour”. One has to be careful with keyword spelling nowadays, even if the scientific search engines are getting better. Fortunately, the title contains many keywords, so I would have found it. If I may, I would like to add something.
cLee SP, Lee HB, and Lee EW, “Web services — an enabling technology for trading partners community virtual integration”, Fourth International Conference on Electronic Business (ICEB 2004), Beijing, China, pp. 727–731, 2004.
dCheng L and Guo TF, “Vapor pressure assisted void growth and cracking of polymeric films and interfaces”, Interface Sci 11(3):277–290, 2003.
Author: Go ahead.
Scientist: This title contains two “and” conjunctions, which create ambiguity. I do not know if there are two contributions in this paper (“Vapor pressure assisted void growth AND cracking of polymeric films and interfaces”) or only one (“Vapor pressure assisted void growth and cracking of polymeric films and interfaces”). The second “and” is just as ambiguous: does the adjective “polymeric” apply to films and interfaces, or only to films? I am sure an expert would not find the title ambiguous, but nonexperts like myself would. Author: Excellent observation. Titles have to be clear to all, experts and nonexperts. Besides and and or, other prepositions can also be quite ambiguous in titles. For example, the preposition with could mean together with as in “coffee with milk”, or it could mean using as in “to move the ground with a shovel”.
The time has come for our last title. It is somewhat tricky. Can you identify the author’s contribution?
“A new approach to blind multiuser detection based on inter-symbol correlation”
Scientist: Other researchers are already doing research in this field, and the author is following the pack with a new approach. Personally, I don’t like the word “approach”: it is vague, whereas the words it replaces are more specific. I would use “method”, “technique”, “system”, “algorithm”, or “technology” instead. I also don’t like titles that start with “a new” something. In my opinion, it never takes long before someone else develops a newer technique. Furthermore, “new” does not indicate what is new or what makes it new. As for the contribution of this paper, I must say I am at a loss. The intersymbol correlation could be new, but if that is the case, why is it at the back of the title? It should be at the front. “Intersymbol correlation for blind multiuser detection” is clear. Or (and I suspect this is the case), intersymbol correlation is not new, but the author has modified the method. That would explain the use of “based on”. In that case, why doesn’t he tell us either the benefit of
the modified method or the method for this modification? It would be more informative and more compelling.
Author: You are quite good at this. Thank you so much for assisting me in this dialogue.
Scientist: Not at all!
Less time than you think Have you ever considered how readers access your title and read it? I do not mean to be a killjoy, but your title is not read: it is scanned, within 2 seconds at the most. Appalling, isn’t it! You spend 9 months researching and 2 full weeks writing the paper, but readers will decide whether to read your paper or not in a second or two! If you do not gener- ate interest in that extremely short time, forget about being read, forget about citations, and forget about making an impact on science.
Your title is usually one of many titles retrieved by the search engine and presented in list form. It may be any- where on the list. Reading a list is not like reading text in the context of a paragraph. Each item on the list stands alone, without context. The only thing you know is that every title on the list contains one or several of your search keywords. What does one have time to do in 2 seconds? Word spotting, mostly. You will pay more attention to the words that surround the search keywords. The rest of the title will be glided over. A short title is better than a long one, but an easily understood long title is bet- ter than a short title whose nouns need unpacking to be understood.
You need to impress. To do that, you have less than 2 seconds of the reader’s time!