Titles are the first thing readers see, yet often they are addressed at the end of your project, and just as often are the aspect of your work that is given the least attention. Creating a title can take no more than the time it takes to summarise your work in a sentence. And yet, their value is incalculable [1]. Strong titles have three elements: keywords, emphasis and impact. A strong title pulls the reader in, making it memorable, encouraging the reader to delve further. A weak title dulls the readers’ expectations and negatively affects their view of your work, no matter how good it may be.
Titles directly influence the number of people who end up reading your work [2]. With the increasing digitalisation of research, more and more people are using online databases to search for relevant materials. That’s why, if you want your article to appear in search results, you should ensure that its title is a good reflection of what you are reporting and that it attracts the right audience. The words you use will determine whether your audience will find your article using common search terms and whether they chose to simply overlook it or explore it further. To William Shakespeare, brevity was the soul of wit. For scientists, it may be even more valuable, as conciseness seems to correlate with how frequently a research paper is cited.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, analysed the titles of 140,000 of the most highly cited peer-reviewed papers published between 2007 and 2013 [3]. They compared the lengths of the papers’ titles with the number of times each paper was cited by other peer-reviewed papers — a statistic sometimes used as a crude measure of importance. They found that journals which publish papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper. It makes sense, the thought of typing in long citation details certainly makes me think twice over whether I might use one particular reference over another. It is also possible that long titles give the impression that the research question was unclear.
In the end, irrespective of the approach you finally use, the ideal title must be succinct and well thought out and should clearly outline the significance and main findings of the accompanying article. In view of the ever-growing number of articles and journals that can be accessed electronically, time spent on writing an informative title is, indeed, time well spent. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. The title of an article has the power to influence the first impression of your work by a reader, reviewer, or editor.
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