A year ago, Janet Rosenbaum wrote:
I’m writing a paper that could appropriately be titled, “Fast state, slow state: what’s the matter with Connecticut?”
I don’t think the journal will go for that, and they will insist on a boring title, but I wanted to let you know.
The article finally appeared! It’s called “Timeliness of provisional United States mortality data releases during the COVID-19 pandemic: delays associated with electronic death registration system and weekly mortality.” So, yeah, no kidding about the boring title. The content’s good, though; that’s what’s important.
Like most people who sometimes read journal articles, I often choose what to read based on the title; if the title looks interesting I read the abstract; if the abstract is good I leaf through and look at the tables and figures; and only then do I even think about actually reading the paper.
I think a lot of people are like me, so I am a fan of having the title deliver the main takeaway: after all, that’s all most people will ever read. Andrew, our title “All maps of parameter estimates are misleading” is still one of my favorites.
For this paper I might have suggested something like “States vary widely in how quickly they report COVID-19 deaths.”
I think sometimes it might vary by intended audience.
For a general or lay audience, a flashy title to attract attention from a more casual reader might be more effective. If the audience is epidemiologists specifically interested in the differences in reporting processes of covid outcomes among different states, a more dry or technical might be more effective.
Knut Schmidt-Nielsen was an animal physiologist who was famous for his clear technical writing. I have tried to use his writing as a model for mine. He taught a course at Duke University for many years. Here is what he says about the importance of an article’s title, in his autobiography “The Camel’s Nose”:
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I begin by explaining the importance of the title. To show how easy it is to lose a reader, I ask “How many titles do you read in a year?” Most students admit they have never given it a moment’s thought and are amazed at the answer. Many regularly scan the tables of contents of …Nature and Science, plus several specialty journals. …Add that to other journals of interest and a reader might easily scan between 5,000 and 10,000 articles in a year. In that crowd it is easy to overlook an interesting article, unless the title is short and clear.
If you produce a long title with difficult words and acronyms, you are likely to lose a potential reader. You are also apt to lose readers if you use lots of unnecessary words and put them up front, where you should put the most important information. Consider the title “Further Comparative Studies of the Food Competition among Grazing Herbivores.” Those first five words say very little and end to keep the subject of the study less obvious. Also, although “Herbivores” perhaps sounds more scientific, “Animals” is simpler. Why not say “Food Competition among Grazing Animals”?
To show how this actually works, I hand out photocopies of tables of contents from scientific journals and ask the students to scan the titles and see if anything interests them. They invariably stop at short titles such as “Freeze Tolerance in Turtles” or the even simpler “Bloat in Sheep.”
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I mostly go through articles on pubmed looking for specific data of interest. The methods and results are of most interest, followed by the discussion of limitations. The title is largely irrelevant but I could see using a heuristic that catchier ones are for papers that will likely waste my time.
It may not be that common now, but as more people use the literature for “data-mining” rather than conclusions I could see the titles becoming less relevant.
Phil –
I like that guide for creating titles. Much of it I already incorporate but it’s useful to see an explicit formula.
That said, I was just suggesting that sometimes people scanning through article titles for research purposes and not only are kind of in key word mode related to particular topics more a than intriguing title mode.
It’s funny that both you and Anon seem to think Knut was suggesting that article titles should be “intriguing. II don’t think that’s what he was going for at all. To use his example, I don’t think hist suggested title of “Food Competition among Grazing Animals” is intended to be “intriguing”, it’s just supposed to be short and clear. That was the case with all of his writing.
Also, at all levels — not just students — many academic writers seem to think they need to make titles sound ‘scientific’; indeed, Joshua, I take your comment that ‘a more dry or technical might be more effective’ to be a suggestion along those lines. Schmidt-Nielsen rejected that idea; witness his change of ‘herbivores’ to ‘animals.’ If you have to use a dry or technical term in the title for reasons of precision or concision then go for it, but if you are actually _trying_ to sound technical or dry then I think that’s misguided. Use plain English if you can.
Phil –
> Joshua, I take your comment that ‘a more dry or technical might be more effective’ to be a suggestion along those lines.
hmmm. I get what you’re saying but that’s not what I was going for. Certainly not in a professor Irwin Corey or “puffery” sense. I get what you’re saying about obtuse science-i-ness. I’m just arguing more in a sense that is adjacent to what Anoneuoid was saying. Sometimes (certainly not always) the audience might be people who are looking for or researching certain technical components or even searching for particular terminology. As such, specifically depending on your intended audience, you might want to put some signposts in the title.
For example, if you audience is people who are specifically researching herbivores and not animals (and the paper you’re titling is specifically about herbivores).
So here –
> but if you are actually _trying_ to sound technical or dry then I think that’s misguided. Use plain English if you can.
I’m in total agreement.
https://youtu.be/MxtN0xxzfsw
I think all “grazing animals” are herbivores, so “grazing animals” is the same as “grazing herbivores.”
The only advantage I can see to ‘herbivore’ in the title is that someone doing a title search might plausibly search by ‘herbivore’, nobody would search by ‘animal’.
But I agree that your title should be inclusive enough that people who are looking for something specific can tell if it’s in there.
Phil –
I’m not sure what we’re disgreeing about at this point – except maybe that you think that the intended audience SHOULDN’T be a consideration when you’re choosing a title for a paper.
And to be picky:
> I think all “grazing animals” are herbivores, so “grazing animals” is the same as “grazing herbivores.”
I was responding to when you said the following:
> witness his change of ‘herbivores’ to ‘animals.’
(without the “grazing.)
Because I didn’t go back up further to where you said this:
> Also, although “Herbivores” perhaps sounds more scientific, “Animals” is simpler. Why not say “Food Competition among *Grazing* Animals”?
For the article based on my dissertation I tried very hard to have the title be something like “Fluid flow causes soil liquefaction” but the reviewers came down on it like a ton of bricks! How dare I assert such a sweeping generalization! After all, they had spent their entire careers and hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money investigating how the lack of fluid flow causes soil liquefaction. Never mind that if you simply do the math, the widely accepted and extremely well tested Darcy’s law simply implies logically that fluid flow must cause liquefaction, and that all the centrifuge experiments needed to show it had been done in the 1980’s, and that the fundamentals of thermodynamics show that if fluid flow doesn’t cause liquefaction then heating is the only other quantity that can cause liquefaction… and that my paper showed under which conditions this could occur.
A major reason I’m not in academia is that in all of my experience it’s full of shit.
You can say all you want about the importance of simple direct writing, but it won’t appear in Academia any time soon… too much rides on obfuscation and puffery.
Somewhat in the spirit of the Ford Prefect convincing the editors of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that they should add one word to their description of earth: perhaps you could have changed the title to “Fluid Flow Often Causes Soil Liquefaction.”
I don’t agree about obfuscation and puffery being required. Andrew usually writes clearly! So did I, when I was in academia (broadly defined), or at least I tried. So did Knut Schmidt-Nielsen.
My dad bought a big book that contains the best papers from the first hundred years of The Physical Review, and passed it along to me. Here’s the entire abstract of Aharonov and Bohm’s “Significance of Electromagnetic Potentials in the Quantum Theory” (1959):
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In this paper, we discuss some interesting properties of the electromagnetic potentials in the quantum domain. We show that, contrary to the conclusion of classical mechanics, there exist effects of potentials on charged particles, even in the region where all of these fields (and therefore the forces on the particles) vanish. We shall then discuss possible experiments to test these conclusions; and, finally, we shall suggest further possible developments in the interpretation of the potentials.
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Admittedly f you don’t know any quantum mechanics then that sounds like gobbledygook, but to anyone with graduate training in physics it’s reasonably clear, and certainly can’t be accused of representing ‘obfuscation and puffery.’
You may think I chose a special example but in fact most of the abstracts are like this. Here’s the first few sentences of Schawlow and Townes (1958):
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The extension of maser techniques to the infrared and optical region is considered. It is shown that by using a resonant cavity of centimeter dimensions, having many resonant modes, maser oscillation at these wavelengths can be achieved by pumping with reasonable amounts of incoherent light. For wavelengths much shorter than those of the ultraviolet region, maser-type amplification appears to be quite impractical…
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You’ve gotta know what a maser is, but otherwise that is about as jargon-free as you can get. It’s noteworthy that they say “many resonant modes,” “reasonable amounts,” and “quite impractical”, all of which would have been opportunities to jam in some jargon or technical detail if they wanted to.
That said, if you (Daniel) were pressured by your professors to write badly, well, I’m not going to claim that you weren’t. Lord knows there is plenty of jargon-filled bullshit out there. But once you are free to write without your advisor making you do it badly, you can do it well.
The claim certainly isn’t that in the 1950s even top researchers had to puff up their results in fact I love papers from the 40s and 50s because they are so straightforward I cited several in my paper.
For me the claim is from at least the 2010s and onward anyone who isn’t already a highly established researcher will have institutional pushback against making simple straightforward claims about anything. Fighting for the right to write a simple paper claiming something potentially controversial but clearly supported by basic mathematics and strong data from multiple sources it’s just exhausting. Reviews from my paper very straightforwardly attempted to suppress everything that I was saying and One reviewer simply said that the journal should no longer spend any time on this paper as it completely is contradicted by everything in any textbook which of course it was because the textbooks were entirely wrong.
I think the only reason the paper was published was that one of the reviewers was from outside the field probably in geophysics.
Anyway it has been a constant struggle for everyone I know who has been active in research over the last 20 years to get any kind of credibility for straightforward quality science without puffery. Imagine for example being somebody competing with Wansink in the field of nutrition research.
It shouldn’t be underestimated how important the scarcity of money is now compared to the 1940s or 50s of course we’re spending way more now than we were then but not at all way more per person. So in fact now I’m going to try to do some data analysis on funding per person with a PhD in biomedical engineering or physics disciplines…