Choosing a strong title for your research paper is very important because the title of your paper is
the first thing that potential future readers are gonna see before they decide whether to look further
at your paper or not.
So what does a strong title look like?
And here are some major properties of a strong title.
First, a strong title has to include the research question or the answer. If every possible answer to
your research question would be interesting
then it can make sense to state the research question in your title to keep the suspense.
So for example for the question "what causes depression?"
almost every possible answer would be interesting.
But if in your case not every possible answer is interesting but actually the answer that YOU found
is particularly interesting,
it can make more sense to state the answer in the title.
So an example for this would be a title such as "insulin causes impotence".
The question here would be "does insulin cause impotence?" but probably nobody would be interested in that.
But if you tell them that the answer is "yes", people may be very interested in your research.
In any case, you want to include either the research question or the answer in the title.
Second, a strong title is short. And it should use maximally 15 words. If less even better.
Third, a strong title should also use the relevant key words. Words that are commonly used in your field
and that other researchers are likely to use as search terms to find your paper.
Fourth, a strong title should be attention-grabbing when researchers see your title among several research
paper titles,
they should be drawn towards your title. And fifth, a strong title should communicate what's new.
Okay.
When you look at this you may realize that this is a lot of stuff for something that is basically just
one sentence and there's the danger that if you cram all of this in one title the title gets very messy
and ends up being more confusing than effective.
So first of all I want to show you a little trick that can help you to prevent that, which is the colon
trick.
Now I'm not saying that you necessarily should use the colon trick but I'm saying that it can be a useful
trick to bring more order to your title. And the colon trick basically means that you split your title
into two parts separated by a colon.
So for example your title could be a general description,
colon, and then a specific description.
Or it could be an attention grabber, colon, and then a description of your research. Or it could be the
topic, colon,
and then again a description of your research.
So this can be a very useful trick to get more into your title without confusing the reader.
So let's have a look at some examples of real titles of research papers.
So the first one is: Agent-based modelling: a new approach for theory building in social psychology.
This is a paper from obviously social psychology and as you can see here it starts by stating the general
topic and then narrows it down and makes clear what's new in this paper.
Another example is: Learning quickly when irrelevant attributes abound: a new linear threshold algorithm.
This is a computer science paper I believe and it starts with a description of what the question of
the research was:
How do you learn quickly when irrelevant attributes abound? And then they communicate clearly what the
contribution of their research is.
It's a new linear threshold algorithm.
Okay.
Another example: Is the face a window to the soul? Investigation of the accuracy of intuitive judgments
of the trustworthiness of human faces.
So this is a very long title and in my opinion it's a bit too long. But nevertheless there are some interesting
things going on here.
So they start with an attention grabber: is the face a window to the soul?
That's a very captivating way of introducing their research. And then they describe dryly what their
research paper is actually about.
And as I said already, in my opinion this title is too long.
But I like the first part of the title.
I think the first part of the title is very well thought through.
Okay one more example.
The strength of weak learn ability.
This is a very influential paper and I think it has an amazing title.
And the reason is because it is a very short title,
it makes clear what the research is about, and it is captivating. And it is captivating mainly because
of the conflict between strength and weak: the strength of weak learn ability.
This title puzzles me and makes me want to read the paper.
It is short.
It is clear it has a lot of things that a good title has. And that might be part of the reason why this
was a very successful research paper.
So as you can see there are many ways to construct titles but they generally have in common that they
clearly state what their research is about. So they either state the question or the answer of the research.
They include relevant keywords.
They are often attention grabbing.
They communicate what's new and if possible they are also short.
So try to check off as many items as you can possibly can.
And if you find that your title gets too confusing.
Use the colon trick.