Titles are the hardest thing: How can we make them more effective?

James Hartley argues that new large-scale research on titles doesn’t tell us much more than we already know. Effective titles attract and inform readers, and do this in a variety of different ways.

 A colleague in my department thinks that if he uses a colon in the title of an article he is writing then the article will be accepted more readily, and cited more frequently, than if he does not. Where has he got this notion from?  A once carefully qualified statement in some research paper has now become a blind article of faith. True enough there is research on the effectiveness of such colonic titles, but it is not that convincing. But rumour and hearsay are powerful things.

Research on titlesThe research on titles can be summarised as follows:

• Almost all of the research takes place in the science and medical fields
• Most of it was done before the advent of electronic counting
• There is research on the effectiveness of grammatical features, such as colons question marks, the results of which I summarise below, and
• There is also research on different types of titles, and on which kinds of title readers prefer.

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