The title is the first look a reader gets at the content of the paper. Thus, it should be as specific and informative as possible. Conciseness is also key for the title, so that it is clear what is most important about your topic. You should aim to capture your audience not by flashy words or entertaining metaphors but by clear relevance to the topics your potential readers are interested in.
Creating Your Title
Your title is often the last part of your article that you will write.
The most important element of research is what was studied. Your title must include what was studied, such as “human hexokinase,” “carbon nanotubes,” or “Vermont bedrock.”
The following titles clearly state the subject of the study, using key details that help the reader determine if the article is relevant to them:
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One common way to construct titles is to say what was studied, followed by and proceeded by modifiers that describe how it was studied. The “what was studied,” in this case, is more succinct in order to maintain conciseness. This is the style commonly used in ACS publications.
The following are examples of titles that follow this format, with the central subject of study underlined:
- Diagnosis of Nephrogenic Systemic Fibrosis by means of Elemental Bioimaging and Speciation Analysis (Birka et al. 2015)
- Direct visualization of concerted proton tunnelling in a water nanocluster (Meng et al. 2015)
- Investigation of the Electronic Origin of Asymmetric Induction in Palladium-Catalyzed Allylic Substitutions with Phosphinooxazoline (PHOX) Ligands by Hammett and Swain–Lupton Analysis of the 13C NMR Chemical Shifts of the (π-Allyl)palladium Intermediates (Armstrong et al. 2012)
Another common style is to indicate an important finding of the research in the title (while still highlighting what was studied). For example:
- Cholesterol Is Required for Efficient Endoplasmic Reticulum-to-Golgi Transport of Secretory Membrane Proteins (Ridsdale et al. 2006)
- Bilayer manganites reveal polarons in the midst of a metallic breakdown (Massee et al. 2010)
One of the major challenges of creating a title is deciding what information is most important to your study and also what is most critical for attracting the right readers.
First, in as few words as possible, identify the organism/phenomenon/idea that you studied. Remember that this must be part of your title. For a field study, the location of your study will be an important part of this.
Then, identify the key overarching result or conclusion of your study, if there is one. If you only have lots of smaller results that connect to one another by your larger theme, you probably won’t want to center your title about your results, because it will quickly become too complicated to explain in a few words. Biological papers are the most likely to prefer results-centered titles, but the style of your title will depend mostly on your target publication.
Also make a note of the major methods or instruments that you used. Are these important to your study or to the results you obtained? If you are using a novel methodology, it is probably more important that you include the method type in your title.
According to the ACS Style Guide, “The title serves two main purposes: to attract the potential audience and to aid retrieval and indexing. Therefore, include several keywords. The title should provide the maximum information for a computerized title search.” Keywords will most often be the things you already identified—your subject, instruments, and results—but will help you keep your title specific to your study. For example, you should refer to a “iron catalyst” instead of a “metal catalyst.”
Recommended steps for creating your article title (summary)
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Step 4 in the summary above is covered in the next section on title conciseness, below.
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Practice exerciseFor each of the following abstracts from published journal articles, construct a title that follows 1) a modifier-subject-modifier format and 2) a subject with findings format. Be sure that each is concise and informative.
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Making Your Title Concise
Many publications have strict word limits not only for article content but also for its title. This limit is often around 10-15 words. So once you’ve created your title, it is a good idea to edit it for conciseness. Cross out (or avoid in the first place!) any of the following, then re-write it, if necessary, to fix any grammar issues created by doing so.
- Redundant phrases like “a study of,” “research about,” or “looking at.”
- Unnecessary uses of “the,” “an,” and “a”
One strategy for making a title more concise is to connect modifying words through hyphens. For example:
a. The extraction of proteins in the solid phase (8 words)
b. Solid-phase protein extraction (3 words)
Regardless of word limits, your title should always be as short as possible while still completely conveying key aspects of the research.
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Practice exerciseEdit the following titles for conciseness. Try to not eliminate words that are likely key to the research.
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Using Appropriate Capitalization
When titling your own paper, the same rules apply as in books or essays. In general,
- Always capitalize the first word of the title
- Capitalize all verbs nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs
- Do not capitalize prepositions, articles (like “an” and “the”), or conjunctions (like “and” and “so”)
Using Abbreviations and Acronyms
In general, it is best to avoid using acronyms or abbreviations in journal article titles because it would waste space to define one, yet the abbreviation might not be well-known enough for everyone to know what your paper is about. For that reason, it is acceptable to use abbreviations that are extremely well-known in your discipline. This can be a hard thing to determine, but it can help to think of what kinds of things are almost never referred to by their complete names, such as “DNA.” However, just because an abbreviation is always used by people in your field does not guarantee that it will be understood in a title that is read by a broader audience.
If you’re unsure about whether or not your abbreviation or acronym is acceptable in a title, try searching that term in the scientific literature and observe how others most commonly use it in their titles.
Ultimately, the decision will depend on your audience—what they already know and are familiar with—and your purpose. A paper published in Science, for instance, would likely spell out “Parallel Virtual Machine” while a paper in Network-Computation in Neural Systems might be able to use “PVM” in its title. In addition, if your study is focused the properties of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), which would involve you explaining what NMR is, you would want to spell it out in the title. But if your paper already assumes knowledge of the technique, then you can probably use the acronym in the title.
Also avoid defining an abbreviation in your title. If you have decided that you can use the abbreviated version, most journals prefer that you use it alone. If you need to use the full term, define the abbreviation in the body of your paper, instead.
Not preferred: Characterization of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in T lymphocytes
Preferred: Characterization of HIV in T lymphocytes
Preferred: Characterization of human immunodeficiency virus in T lymphocytes