How to give a good title to a research paper?

In the era of eyeball economy, the title party is everywhere, and the field of scientific research papers is no exception According to the analysis of vinkers, tijdink and Otte, scientists from the medical center of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, there is a trend of overstating research results in the current scientific research community Scientists are becoming more and more optimistic when describing their research results After analyzing the papers on the PubMed database, they found that during the 40 years from 1974 to 2014, the number of words in scientific research papers, such as robust, novel, amazing, innovative and unprecedenteded, increased nearly nine times in the titles and abstracts of papers Correspondingly, words such as dispointing and pessimistic are used more frequently, but less frequently In PubMed's papers published in 1974-2014, the frequency of positive words, negative words and novel changed (source: nature) the team used 25 "positive" words and 25 "negative" words to analyze the topic and abstract of PubMed papers in the past 40 years, and found that the frequency of using "positive" words was only 2% in 1974-1980, reaching 17.5% in 2014, an increase of 8.8 times In particular, the words robust, novel, innovative and unprecedented have been used 150 times more frequently The most frequent one is novel More than 7% of PubMed papers have it in their titles or abstracts If the trend continues, by 2113, every article will have the word novel Researchers in English speaking countries are more frequently used At the same time, the frequency of using "negative" words increased from 1.3% to 3.2% This change seems to be unique to academic papers Because of the same analysis of books of the same period, the team found little change Vinkers believes that this trend shows a problem If all the research results are robust and novel, then it is impossible to distinguish the research of group selection from the general research In fact, breakthrough research and repetitive research have their own value In the long run, how to describe the research results is no longer determined by the research content, but by the ability of writing To a certain extent, readers' selection of articles requires scientific researchers to master some skills of "one book is not proper" Although this is more or less eye-catching and helpless, as long as it can solve scientific problems reasonably and effectively, isn't it better to have a smooth title? The title of the article is an opportunity for the study to make a first impression on the readers Some experienced researchers will say that the title of a paper is usually revised after the article is written This is because it is very important to have a good title to maximize the impact of the article Bibliometrics and alternative metrics tracking, when measuring the value of an article, consider the number of times the article has been watched and clicked Helen eassom, the marketing specialist of Wiley, one of the oldest publishers in the world, suggests that before determining the final title, you need to consider the basic requirements of several proposed titles, then come up with several alternative titles, and then go back to revise the title after completing the whole article The number of words in these alternative titles is limited to 10-20 words; write a phrase or ask a question accurately using the terminology in the research field; actively introduce the articles to arouse readers' interest in reading According to a joint study by Sinisa Subotic, a Serbian scholar, and Bhaskar Mukherjee, an Indian scholar, different characteristics of the title of the paper, such as length, eye-catching words, colons, and pleasure, are related to the number of downloads and citations The most important feature of the title is the length, and the shorter title is related to the higher cited quantity Another study published by Adrian letchford's team at the University of Warwick in the UK on royal society open science shows the same conclusion The team analyzed the titles of 140000 highly cited papers from 2007 to 2013 in the Scopus database, and found that the shorter the paper title, the more times it was cited Therefore, eassom suggests that any unnecessary words that are not helpful to the actual meaning and value of the article should be eliminated when starting the title, such as "a about A study of And so on Avoid words or phrases that do not help the reader understand the content of the paper, and make sure that the title hits the main point of the article And don't be afraid to add a little bit of your own style to the concise title of the article At the same time, we should avoid boring the title However, the title cannot be too short Too short a title is often too boring to describe the details of a paper Instead, add a little more detail When determining the content of the title, it is helpful to list the questions that the paper answers For a broad topic, the article may answer 20 questions If the topic is narrow, 2-3 questions may come up After that, you can think about the title of the paper according to these questions In the final formulation of the title, you can refer to the theme or hypothesis of the paper, similarly, there are conclusions There is no problem in using the conclusion as the title, because readers want to know how the author got the conclusion A good academic paper title may actually be a slingshot autoscup, but that's a good thing Ask yourself some direct questions What is the purpose of the study? What is the narrative tone of the article? What is the writing method of the article? The purpose of the article can draw a conclusion perfectly At the same time, the tone of the narrative depends on the opinions put forward, such as providing research results that can change the paradigm, producing explosive news of major events, or drawing surprising conclusions that no one can expect Finally, it should be noted that the readers or reviewers of the article may not have the same professional knowledge as the author Now many journals hope that the author's articles can be directed to a wider audience, that is, all people with profound knowledge and solid education background, not only experts in the same narrow research field with the paper to be published Therefore, in many cases, the title of the article will be given to a fairly "ordinary" reader For example, as a chemist, the author must know what phosphates are, what catalysis will make things change, and what compounds are represented by several words in the title But the reviewer is likely to be a biologist, who may not even be able to write the chemical formula of ketone Therefore, according to Jamali and Nikzad, when stating the main conclusions of the paper, the declarative title can be as "popular" as possible, or simply using a question title to indicate the theme of the paper to attract the attention of the readers.