Answer:
Readers are first introduced to your journal article through its title and images. Think about when you surf social media, news sites, or magazines. What makes you stop skimming and encourages you to read the content? The title or a cool image, of course!
Since we provide tips for labelling your legends in a separate article, this post will focus on how to create the best title for your journal manuscript. In particular, we will cover the following:
Which title formats you could use for your journal article.
What information you should include in your titles.
How long your journal manuscript title should be.
Whether you should “have fun” with your title.
The following is a summary of our recommendations for how to craft the best title for your journal manuscript. This step can be completed in either the drafting or manuscript editing or proofreading process while you are preparing your work for submission to journals.
Explanation:
Click on the link at the top of the page to download a printable version.*
As with all other information you receive about preparing journal articles, please remember to consult your target journal’s guide for authors and survey recent works published by your target journal to understand its editors’ stylistic preferences.
What Title Formats Are Best for Your Journal Article?
In the infographic above, we briefly point out the pros and cons of various title formats. Below, we provide you with further details about specific title structures and some real-world examples, for reference.
Before we dive into the various title categories, we’d like to explain our approach in preparing this overview. James Hartley conveniently classifies title formats into 13 categories, which we have adapted and re-configured into five types, after conducting our own survey of the most recent and most popular articles on major journal publication sites such as Nature, Elsevier, and Springer. We have also examined papers that analyze recent trends in manuscript title structure and have incorporated our findings into this post.
Below are tables that outline each title type’s key characteristics (preferred grammatical structures and information to include), specify the articles types that commonly use each title format, and list relevant sample titles from major academic publications. Where we do not list any examples by article type, it is because such formats are highly uncommon for that article category.
Finally, while we recognize that each journal has its own article types, we have broadly sorted published papers into the following groups:
Rapid response and short communication (e.g. letters and corrections): Early communication that highlights significant recent findings, new methods, software, or correspondence aimed at correcting or clarifying original research papers (usually published online only).
Research paper: An article that discusses details of recent original projects, including their data, results, and findings.
Review: A paper that summarizes recently published developments on a topic, without adding new data.
Clinical case: A research paper specifically focusing on clinical research.
Now, let’s look at these formats in more detail.
1. Titles that communicate the general subject
Key characteristics:
Phrases, mainly composed of nouns, that clearly communicate the overall subject matter.
These titles use keywords from abstracts to optimize search engine results, without exceeding the average title length.
Avoid taxonomic terminology as they’ve become less popular in recent years.
Don’t use obscure words since titles that incorporate such words tend to have less impact.
This format is common for reviews, research papers (including clinical cases), and rapid responses
