how to find a research article title

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• How to Write a Great Title

Maximize search-ability and engage your readers from the very beginning

Your title is the first thing anyone who reads your article is going to see, and for many it will be where they stop reading. Learn how to write a title that helps readers find your article, draws your audience in and sets the stage for your research!

How your title impacts the success of your article

Researchers are busy and there will always be more articles to read than time to read them.  Good titles help readers find your research, and decide whether to keep reading. Search engines use titles to retrieve relevant articles based on users’ keyword searches. Once readers find your article, they’ll use the title as the first filter to decide whether your research is what they’re looking for. A strong and specific title is the first step toward citations, inclusion in meta-analyses, and influencing your field. 

What to include in a title

Include the most important information that will signal to your target audience that they should keep reading.

Key information about the study design

Important keywords

What you discovered

Writing tips

Getting the title right can be more difficult than it seems, and researchers refine their writing skills throughout their career. Some journals even help editors to re-write their titles during the publication process! 

• Keep it concise and informative What’s appropriate for titles varies greatly across disciplines. Take a look at some articles published in your field, and check the journal guidelines for character limits. Aim for fewer than 12 words, and check for journal specific word limits.
• Write for your audience Consider who your primary audience is: are they specialists in your specific field, are they cross-disciplinary, are they non-specialists?
• Entice the reader Find a way to pique your readers’ interest, give them enough information to keep them reading.
• Incorporate important keywords Consider what about your article will be most interesting to your audience: Most readers come to an article from a search engine, so take some time and include the important ones in your title!
• Write in sentence case In scientific writing, titles are given in sentence case. Capitalize only the first word of the text, proper nouns, and genus names. See our examples below.

Don’t

• Write your title as a question In most cases, you shouldn’t need to frame your title as a question. You have the answers, you know what you found. Writing your title as a question might draw your readers in, but it’s more likely to put them off.
• Sensationalize your research Be honest with yourself about what you truly discovered. A sensationalized or dramatic title might make a few extra people read a bit further into your article, but you don’t want them disappointed when they get to the results.

Examples…

Format: Prevalence of [disease] in [population] in [location]

Example: Prevalence of tuberculosis in homeless women in San Francisco

Format: Risk factors for [condition] among [population] in [location]

Example: Risk factors for preterm births among low-income women in Mexico City

Format (systematic review/meta-analysis): Effectiveness of [treatment] for [disease] in [population] for [outcome] : A systematic review and meta-analysis

Example: Effectiveness of Hepatitis B treatment in HIV-infected adolescents in the prevention of liver disease: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Format (clinical trial): [Intervention] improved [symptoms] of [disease] in [population] : A randomized controlled clinical trial

Example: Using a sleep app lessened insomnia in post-menopausal women in southwest United States: A randomized controlled clinical trial

Format  (general molecular studies): Characterization/identification/evaluation of [molecule name] in/from [organism/tissue] (b y [specific biological methods] ) 

Example: Identification of putative Type-I sex pheromone biosynthesis-related genes expressed in the female pheromone gland of Streltzoviella insularis

Format  (general molecular studies): [specific methods/analysis] of organism/tissue reveal insights into [function/role] of [molecule name] in [biological process]  

Example: Transcriptome landscape of Rafflesia cantleyi floral buds reveals insights into the roles of transcription factors and phytohormones in flower development

Format  (software/method papers): [tool/method/software] for [what purpose] in [what research area]

Example: CRISPR-based tools for targeted transcriptional and epigenetic regulation in plants

Tip: How to edit your work

Editing is challenging, especially if you are acting as both a writer and an editor. Read our guidelines for advice on how to refine your work, including useful tips for setting your intentions, re-review, and consultation with colleagues.

• How to Write an Abstract
• How to Write Your Methods
• How to Report Statistics
• How to Write Discussions and Conclusions
• How to Edit Your Work

The contents of the Peer Review Center are also available as a live, interactive training session, complete with slides, talking points, and activities. …

The contents of the Writing Center are also available as a live, interactive training session, complete with slides, talking points, and activities. …

There’s a lot to consider when deciding where to submit your work. Learn how to choose a journal that will help your study reach its audience, while reflecting your values as a researcher…

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How to Make a Research Paper Title with Examples

What is a research paper title and why does it matter?

A research paper title summarizes the aim and purpose of your research study. Making a title for your research is one of the most important decisions when writing an article to publish in journals. The research title is the first thing that journal editors and reviewers see when they look at your paper and the only piece of information that fellow researchers will see in a database or search engine query. Good titles that are concise and contain all the relevant terms have been shown to increase citation counts and Altmetric scores .

Therefore, when you title research work, make sure it captures all of the relevant aspects of your study, including the specific topic and problem being investigated. It also should present these elements in a way that is accessible and will captivate readers. Follow these steps to learn how to make a good research title for your work.

How to Make a Research Paper Title in 5 Steps

You might wonder how you are supposed to pick a title from all the content that your manuscript contains—how are you supposed to choose? What will make your research paper title come up in search engines and what will make the people in your field read it? 

In a nutshell, your research title should accurately capture what you have done, it should sound interesting to the people who work on the same or a similar topic, and it should contain the important title keywords that other researchers use when looking for literature in databases. To make the title writing process as simple as possible, we have broken it down into 5 simple steps.

Step 1: Answer some key questions about your research paper

What does your paper seek to answer and what does it accomplish? Try to answer these questions as briefly as possible. You can create these questions by going through each section of your paper and finding the MOST relevant information to make a research title.

Step 2: Identify research study keywords

Now that you have answers to your research questions, find the most important parts of these responses and make these your study keywords. Note that you should only choose the most important terms for your keywords–journals usually request anywhere from 3 to 8 keywords maximum.

Step 3: Research title writing: use these keywords

“We employed a case study of 60 liver transplant patients around the US aged 20-50 years to assess how waiting list volume affects the outcomes of liver transplantation in patients; results indicate a positive correlation between increased waiting list volume and negative prognosis after the transplant procedure.”

The sentence above is clearly much too long for a research paper title. This is why you will trim and polish your title in the next two steps.

Step 4: Create a working research paper title

To create a working title, remove elements that make it a complete “sentence” but keep everything that is important to what the study is about. Delete all unnecessary and redundant words that are not central to the study or that researchers would most likely not use in a database search.

“ We employed a case study of 60 liver transplant patients around the US aged 20-50 years to assess how the waiting list volume affects the outcome of liver transplantation in patients ; results indicate a positive correlation between increased waiting list volume and a negative prognosis after transplant procedure ”

Now shift some words around for proper syntax and rephrase it a bit to shorten the length and make it leaner and more natural. What you are left with is:

“A case study of 60 liver transplant patients around the US aged 20-50 years assessing the impact of waiting list volume on outcome of transplantation and showing a positive correlation between increased waiting list volume and a negative prognosis” (Word Count: 38)

This text is getting closer to what we want in a research title, which is just the most important information. But note that the word count for this working title is still 38 words, whereas the average length of published journal article titles is 16 words or fewer. Therefore, we should eliminate some words and phrases that are not essential to this title.

Step 5: Remove any nonessential words and phrases from your title

Because the number of patients studied and the exact outcome are not the most essential parts of this paper, remove these elements first:

 “A case study of 60 liver transplant patients around the US aged 20-50 years assessing the impact of waiting list volume on outcomes of transplantation and showing a positive correlation between increased waiting list volume and a negative prognosis” (Word Count: 19)

In addition, the methods used in a study are not usually the most searched-for keywords in databases and represent additional details that you may want to remove to make your title leaner. So what is left is:

“Assessing the impact of waiting list volume on outcome and prognosis in liver transplantation patients” (Word Count: 15)

In this final version of the title, one can immediately recognize the subject and what objectives the study aims to achieve. Note that the most important terms appear at the beginning and end of the title: “Assessing,” which is the main action of the study, is placed at the beginning; and “liver transplantation patients,” the specific subject of the study, is placed at the end.

This will aid significantly in your research paper title being found in search engines and database queries, which means that a lot more researchers will be able to locate your article once it is published. In fact, a 2014 review of more than 150,000 papers submitted to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) database found the style of a paper’s title impacted the number of citations it would typically receive. In most disciplines, articles with shorter, more concise titles yielded more citations.

Adding a Research Paper Subtitle

If your title might require a subtitle to provide more immediate details about your methodology or sample, you can do this by adding this information after a colon:

“ : a case study of US adult patients ages 20-25”

If we abide strictly by our word count rule this may not be necessary or recommended. But every journal has its own standard formatting and style guidelines for research paper titles, so it is a good idea to be aware of the specific journal author instructions , not just when you write the manuscript but also to decide how to create a good title for it.

Research Paper Title Examples

The title examples in the following table illustrate how a title can be interesting but incomplete, complete by uninteresting, complete and interesting but too informal in tone, or some other combination of these. A good research paper title should meet all the requirements in the four columns below.

Tips on Formulating a Good Research Paper Title

In addition to the steps given above, there are a few other important things you want to keep in mind when it comes to how to write a research paper title, regarding formatting, word count, and content:

• Write the title after you’ve written your paper and abstract
• Include all of the essential terms in your paper
• Keep it short and to the point (~16 words or fewer)
• Avoid unnecessary jargon and abbreviations
• Use keywords that capture the content of your paper
• Never include a period at the end—your title is NOT a sentence

Research Paper Writing Resources

We hope this article has been helpful in teaching you how to craft your research paper title. But you might still want to dig deeper into different journal title formats and categories that might be more suitable for specific article types or need help with writing a cover letter for your manuscript submission.

In addition to getting English proofreading services , including paper editing services , before submission to journals, be sure to visit our academic resources papers. Here you can find dozens of articles on manuscript writing, from drafting an outline to finding a target journal to submit to.

What Makes a Good Research Article Title?

What-makes-a-good-research-article-title.

Helen Eassom, Copywriter, Wiley

November 16, 2017

Your title is your first opportunity to draw in readers, so you must ensure that it makes an impact. Compared to the work you put in to the full paper, the title may feel like an afterthought, but creating a good title is essential to maximizing the reach of your article.

Your final title should do several things to draw readers into your article. Consider these basics of title creation to come up with a few ideas:

• Limit yourself to 10 to 20 substantial words.
• Devise a phrase or ask a question.
• Make a positive impression of the article.
• Use current terminology in your field of study.
• Stimulate reader interest.

A good research article title offers a brief explanation of the article before you delve into specifics. Before you get to a final title, you can start with a working title that gives you a main idea of what to focus on throughout your piece. Then you can come back to revise the title when you finish the article.

The Writing Process

As you write your research article, it can be useful to make a list of the questions that your article answers. For a broad topic, your article may answer 20 questions. If your subject is very narrow, you might come up with two or three questions. You can then use these questions to inform your research title.

Your article subject or hypothesis may also give you an idea for the final title, but so can your conclusion. As you write your research article from beginning to end, you draw several conclusions before answering your main idea or hypothesis. There's nothing wrong with using your conclusion as a title because your readers want to know how you derived the solution. A good research article title may actually be a spoiler, but that's a good thing. Once you have a draft title, you’ll need to take care of a few details to keep it interesting.

The Details

Take out any unnecessary words (such as ‘A Study of’, or ‘An Investigation of’) which don’t contribute any real meaning or value to your title. Avoid words or phrases that don't help your readers understand the context of your work, and ensure that your title gets to the real point of your article.

Your title needs to grab readers’ interest, so don't fear putting a little style into your article title. You can still avoid a boring title while getting to the point.

Don't make your title too short. The words "South American Politics" are clearly much too broad and don’t say what your research article entails. Rather, expand a bit to include more detail. Examine the title "South American Politics and Venezuelan Oil Clash with Brazil's Rain Forest Conservation Efforts”. The second title has more substance, keywords and enough meat to build interest.

Final Thoughts

Ask yourself a few questions that get to the heart of your article. What is the purpose of the research? What's the narrative tone of the article? What methods do you use to write the article? The purpose of your article provides the perfect lead-in to your conclusion. Meanwhile, your narrative tone depends on the point you make, such as delivering results of a paradigm-shifting study, breaking news of some major story or making a startling conclusion that no one expected.

A good article title represents the first impression people see of your work, so make sure you give your research the title it deserves!

How do you determine the title of your research article? Share your thoughts in the comments below .

Image Credit: Niklebedev/Shutterstock

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Getting the title right

The title is the first thing you write. It is the moment you decide what is the purpose, focus and message of your article.

The title is also the first thing we will see of your published article. Whether we decide to click and read the abstract, or download the full article depends – at least, partly - on this first impression.

In this blogpost, I share some thoughts on what makes a good title, and how to come up with one. Even if you can´t find a great title for your article, what you can definitely do is avoid a bad one. I start with tips on what to avoid, proceed with properties and examples of good titles and finish with an illustration of how to get a decent title for a paper.

Five big ‘No’s.

A good title should be informative, argumentative and intriguing. And that’s all - any extra words that do not inform us or intrigue us about the argument, question, hypothesis or contribution of your article are redundant.

While it is difficult to come up with strong titles, you can start by avoiding bad ones!

Never do the following (disclosure - I’ve done all five of them):

Don't tell us in the title what is it that you are doing (‘a study of’, ‘lessons from’, ‘insights on’, ‘the case of’, ‘a comparison of’, ‘exploring’, ‘investigating’, ‘assessing’, ‘evaluating’, ‘measuring’). We know that this is a research paper. Go ahead and tell us what you found, not what you did.

Do not add dead words or words that are too general, such as: ‘beyond’, ‘from … to …’, ‘towards a’.

Avoid clichés and platitudes (‘exploring the contradictions of’, ‘integrating the’, ‘revealing the complexity of’). We know that research objects are complex (we wouldn’t study them if they were not), that causal relations in the real world are contradictory, or that integrating is better than separating.

Don´t tell us the method you are using or the approach you are following (‘a survey of’, ‘an econometric panel data analysis of’, ‘a case study of’, ‘an interdisciplinary perspective’). Exception: do it if the innovation of your paper is the method itself - but then tell us what your innovation is, not the name of your method.

Don’t try too hard to be witty. I’ve seen one too many papers that are ‘a tale of two’ .. islands, rivers, case-studies, ethnographies or surveys. I am sure there are also papers that are ‘gone with the wind’, or worst, ‘gone with the sea’.

Ashamed of past sins

Consider this title of an early paper of mine. “The EU water framework directive: measures and implications” .

Terrible. Boring as hell. I don’t want to read this paper and I am the one who wrote it.

What is wrong with this title?

First, it does not inform the reader about the purpose of my research or my argument. The reader only learns that I am analysing a legislative piece called the Water Framework Directive.

Second, ‘measures’ and ‘implications’ are descriptive, redundant terms. I am analysing a legislation, so of course I will describe its measures and talk about its implications.

The reader does not learn what is interesting or new about my analysis – no hint of what I found or what I will argue. I do not intrigue you to read the paper (unless you are a serious water nerd).

The three elements of a good title

What makes a great title?

Let me repeat.

A good title is informative: the core variables, phenomena or concepts you are contributing to, are there. The purpose of your paper is clear.

A better title is also argumentative: your (hypo)thesis, core finding, or politically-relevant conclusion is there. Ideally, this may include the process that connects your core variables, or the empirical pattern you demonstrate for your phenomenon.

A great title is also intriguing (without being cheesy): it attracts the attention of the reader, it promises something interesting and a new argument or explanation that the reader has not encountered before.

Most of us can write good titles. Titles that inform about the research we did (e.g. my “Social metabolism, ecological distribution conflicts, and valuation languages” ). The challenge is to go the extra mile and write great titles – titles that let the reader know not only what you researched, but also what you found. Titles that intrigue the reader to read your paper.  

Learn from the champs

Consider two of the most cited titles in environmental studies.

‘ Limits to growth ’. It can´t get better than that. In just three words, the title informs you what this work is about: growth and its limits. The thesis, novelty and contribution are clear: unlike what others claim, this piece will argue that there are limits to growth – unlike others studying the causes of growth, this work studies the limits to growth. And this makes it intriguing.

Or Garett Hardin’s four-worded ‘tragedy of the commons’ . By reading the title you know what it is about: the commons. You also get the process, or hypothesis, Hardin is going to demonstrate and explain – the collapse of the commons.

The argument is intriguing: commons end up in tragedy. Written at the height of the Cold War, Hardin’s paper had an underlying political message: commons (shorthand for communism) end up in tragedy and there is a scientific reason why this is so. Like or dislike his conclusion, you are curious to read his paper and you want to engage with the argument, to support it or refute it.

My own In defence of degrowth tries something similar. It is short. It is politically provocative. And it is informative: the reader knows this paper is going to be about growth and degrowth.

But it lacks something that the limits or tragedy titles have: they make an argument. They have a thesis. My title does not say why or how I defend degrowth. (I could add a subtitle to capture this, but then some of the intrigue would be lost – see further on about subtitles and title length).

This is fine. We can´t be perfect. Rules can be broken. If your title is informative and intriguing enough, I think you can excuse yourself if you cannot capture also the thesis within the title.

Create some suspense with a question

Good research papers have good research questions. And good questions can be effective titles. Question titles lack an argument, but they intrigue with suspense.

Consider Daron Acemoglu’s and James Robinson’s ‘Why nations fail’ . You sure want to know why nations fail!

The book deals with the study of so-called ‘state failure’ – corruption and the collapse of government institutions. Instead of using this academic terminology, it uses simple language that speaks to everyone, while hinting to academics what it is about.

Another good question-title my ex-classmate Nathan McClintock came up with is ‘Why farm the city?’

I’ve seen scores of recent articles on urban agriculture (or urban gardening). I would never read one called ‘Beyond existing explanations of urban agriculture: lessons and contradictions’. But I am intrigued to learn why so many people suddenly farm in cities.

Often a subtitle follows a main, shorter title. ´Why nations fail´ for example, is followed by ‘The origins of power, prosperity and poverty´. ‘Why farm the city’ is followed by the more esoteric ‘Theorizing urban agriculture through the lens of metabolic rift’.

A subtitle explains or provides context to a shorter main title, it sets the place and time under study or the method used, and adds substance if your main title is a catchy visual cue, verbal quote or open question.

If you can avoid a subtitle, and your title is powerful enough on its own, I would say avoid it. Hardin did. Adding the place, time or method of your research weakens the generality of your claim – the reader will find this information in the abstract or the paper anyway. Darwin did not have to explain that his study of the origin of species covered millions of years and was based on specimens collected in England and the Galapagos.

Too short or too long?

One reason I am sceptical of subtitles is because very long headings tend to be confusing. As a rule of thumb, a title, including the subtitle, should be between 5 and 15 words.

I am personally fan of ‘short is beautiful’. If you can say it in three or four words, go for it!

Why nations fail? Why farm the city? The tragedy of the commons. The origin of species. You don’t need to say more than that.

Fair enough: you may feel you are not Darwin yet. A longer title with many dead words diminishes your claim to contribution and makes you feel safer. But time to get out of your comfort zone and stake the relevance of your research. If it is not relevant, why did you do it? And why do you want us to read it?

Lively titles

A common title structure used in the social sciences is “Lively cue: informative title”.

The lively cue takes the form of a visual cue, a metaphor, a pun, a literary reference or a quote from something someone said.

As I wrote, if you have to try hard to be witty, then don’t. Do it only if the cue comes naturally to you and only if it is your thesis.

Consider Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling alone: America's declining social capital’ .

The thesis, and core finding of the book - that social bonds are weakening in the U.S. - is in the title for you to see: a person bowling alone. The subtitle informs you about the phenomenon studied, ‘social capital’ - and the process that is demonstrated empirically: the ‘decline’ of social capital. This is the perfect use of the cue: it really drives home the message of what this book is about, with a visual metaphor that speaks to all of us. The subtitle explains and asserts scientific credibility: make no mistake this is not a book about bowling.

Consider instead the title I chose with my friends Christos Zografos and Erik Gomez for our paper ‘To value or not to value? That is not the question’ .

The paper deals with the monetary valuation of nature: should we try to calculate the worth of a river? Our Shakespearean hint points to the quasi-existential dimension of this dilemma among ecological economists, the audience of this particular article. ‘That is not the question’ summarises our conclusion: the terms of the debate are wrong.

Looking back at it, I find our title somewhat pompous. The rest of the article is an esoteric debate on methods of monetary valuation with arcane academic language. The comparison to a Shakespearean drama makes us good candidates to be covered by the Onion .

My advice: use wit with caution and only if you are 100% sure that you can pull it off. Like an airplane cockpit, journal articles are not the place to be funny - titles even less so. Be aware of the risk when you use literary or other references. You might seem to be exaggerating the importance of your own work (we are the Shakespeares of ecological economics) – not a good idea, more so if you are a starting researcher.

Same principles apply to quotes from interviews. Don’t do it unless the quote is your thesis. Consider a title like “‘Let them die alone’: homelessness and social exclusion in downtown New York” (I imagined this).

‘Let them die alone’ could be a phrase that an officer, businessman or an angry neighbour told you the researcher. If the core thesis of your article is that there is an intentional abandonment of homeless people, and as a result they die, then this quotation is impactful.

If however your article is about something different, say increasing numbers of homelessness and unfair housing policies, or if you touch only peripherally on questions of intentional neglect, then the phrase is just sensational and distractive.

If you end up using a quote, make sure that it is grammatically correct, and that its meaning is crystal clear to everyone. Using quotes in the title is risky if you are not a native speaker. Many of my students are not (I am not either). Translating quotes from interviews they took in Spanish or Greek often times do not make sense in English.

Let’s do this!

You know what your article is going to be about. It's time to baptise it! I have created a workbook with a three step process to help you create better titles. Click on the image below to access the workbook.

If you tried any of this and it worked or didn't work let me know in the comments below. And if you have other tips to share, please let us know!

Written by Giorgos Kallis

Giorgos Kallis is an ICREA professor of environmental science at ICTA in Barcelona. Giorgos has degrees in Chemistry, Economics, Environmental Engineering and Environmental Policy and Planning. Before coming to Barcelona, he was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Article titles: the do's and don'ts.

• Charlesworth Author Services
• 25 April, 2017
• Academic Writing Skills

Article Titles: The Do's and Don’ts

Selecting a good title for this article seemed much more important than usual so we hesitated for quite some time to find one that might set a good example. If you have any feedback, please see links below!

So, how did we eventually decide on this heading?

Choosing a title – ours as an example

Firstly, we wrote down the topic: article titles.

Next, we thought about the purpose of the article: explaining what to do and what not to do when selecting an article title.

Finally, we used statistics from previous studies to format the title with a colon.

Charlesworth Author Services published an article last year about the importance of selecting a good title for your research paper, and it is such an important topic that we decided to publish another one to discuss some recent research on the matter. To see our previous article, please visit http://cwauthors.com/article/ChoosingTitleAcademicResearchPaper .

It goes without saying that the title is the first thing that readers will see: journals will use it to judge whether the article is likely to be a viable submission and researchers will use it to judge whether the article will be useful to read. Recently, however, studies have confirmed quite how important titles really are.

Findings from Research Trends

Over the course of five years (2006–2010), Research Trends conducted a study on the impact of titles on the success of research articles. [1]

It was found that the length of the title did not correlate entirely to the number of citations, but that “papers with titles between 31 and 40 characters were cited the most”. [2]

Interestingly, results of the study also showed that “titles containing a comma or colon were cited more” than those containing a question mark. [3] By contrast, of the articles included in the study, the top 10 most cited contained no punctuation at all.

Findings from Research Excellence Framework

A more recent study based on 150,000 papers submitted to the Research Excellence Framework database in 2014 corroborated many of the earlier findings. For example, “citations increased with titles that used colons, and declined with the use of question marks”. [4]

The report, published in Scientometrics, was also examined in Nature Index. Analyses suggest that title length is affected by subject area, and so longer titles are more acceptable in certain fields, namely Public Health and Clinical Medicine, while in other disciplines there are, on average, fewer characters in a title: Philosophy, Economics. [5]

Both the above studies found that humorous titles were cited less, so there is no need to agonize over a pun to attract readers.

Expert advice

According to BioScience Writers, some journals may only consider the title and abstract when selecting articles for publication. So, to create a positive impression titles should contain the following three elements: [6]

1.        Key words and key phrases:  Describe the topic of your article so that it can be found when searching by

           subject.

2.        Emphasis:  Clarify the most important features of your article.

3.        Impact:  Draw readers’ attention to your article by explaining how your results or methods are novel or

           innovative.

Similarly, Columbia University advises researchers to be specific in their titles, and claims that outlining the results is sometimes more effective: “Students who smoke get lower grades”. [7]

Summary points on choosing a title:

·          Try to create a clear and concise title

·          Reflect on title length of articles which are highly cited in your field of research

·          Include novel or innovative results or methods

·          If your title requires punctuation to aid reader understanding, consider using a colon or commas

·          Avoid using question marks and semi-colons

·          Avoid humor

Ultimately, however, as all cited resources mention, a good title cannot compensate for a poor paper! What it can do, though, is help to promote all your hard work by promoting the content of your paper and drawing in readers.

Please see the following websites for more information about the studies and for further advice on writing article titles:

·          http://cwauthors.com/article/ChoosingTitleAcademicResearchPaper

·          https://www.researchtrends.com/issue24-september-2011/heading-for-success-or-how-not-to-title-your-paper/

·          http://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/how-research-paper-titles-can-make-or-break

·          http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/ug/research/paper.html

Additional help and support

Any questions? Charlesworth Author Services can advise you on your editing needs. Please contact us at [email protected] or [email protected] .

[1] https://www.researchtrends.com/issue24-september-2011/heading-for-success-or-how-not-to-title-your-paper/ Accessed 10 April 2017

[2] https://www.researchtrends.com/issue24-september-2011/heading-for-success-or-how-not-to-title-your-paper/ Accessed 10 April 2017

[3] https://www.researchtrends.com/issue24-september-2011/heading-for-success-or-how-not-to-title-your-paper/ Accessed 10 April 2017

[4] http://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/how-research-paper-titles-can-make-or-break Accessed 10 April 2017

[5] http://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/how-research-paper-titles-can-make-or-break Accessed 10 April 2017

[6] http://www.biosciencewriters.com/Writing-Strong-Titles-for-Research-Manuscripts.aspx Accessed 10 April 2017

[7] http://www.columbia.edu/cu/biology/ug/research/paper.html Accessed 10 April 2017

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How to Create the Best Title for Your Article

The title is the first part of an article to be published in journals of scientific journal publishers ; however, it is better to be written at the end when you are done with writing your article. An article may need several months of research and, meanwhile, you may come up with new ideas that may change the direction of your study. Hence, it is suggested to note down all your ideas as a draft and when your article has taken a final shape, think of drafting the title.

The title indicates the main idea of the article. It is the part of the article that is read first; it catches the eye and arouses interest in the article.

Types of titles

You may choose any of the three types of title for your journal article: declarative, descriptive, and interrogative.

• A declarative title presents a summary of key findings and results. This type of title provides the most insight into the contents of the paper and is commonly used for research articles.
• A descriptive title is the most common type of title and describes the topic of study but excludes results and conclusion.
• An interrogative title presents the topic of study as a question. It is generally used in review articles.

Characteristics of an effective title

To create an effective title, you should:

• write the main topic and subtopic separated by a colon (title: subtitle).
• indicate accurately the topic and scope of the study.
• use 10 to 20 words; though the length of the title may depend on your subject of interest (in peer-reviewed and open-access medical journal , article titles are longer than in Mathematics journals).
• use common words and current nomenclature in your field of study.
• Try to add keywords so that your readers may search easily.
• use the colon if you would like to use a subtitle (subtitle provides additional information).
• spell out abbreviations in the title.
• use simple and common words and avoid jargon.
• scientific names of organisms should be italicized.
• spell out numbers.
• use a comma, if required, and parenthesis but avoid semicolon.

Finally, the title and abstract should match the rest of the article. Also, check that you have adhered to the guidelines of the journal to which you are going to submit your article.

Keep it short

Too long a title may create an aversion in the reader and some readers may even avoid opening the article. The title should include as much information about the article as possible in the fewest words.

I certainly thank you for writing this article well, hopefully it will become a reference in journals or other scientific writings and can help many people. thanks.

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Titles in research articles

Ken Hyland , Hang (Joanna) Zou

• School of Education & Lifelong Learning
• Language in Education

Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

• Academic writing
• Corpus analysis
• Disciplinary differences
• Research articles

Access to Document

• 10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101094 Licence: CC BY
• Hyland_Zou_2022_JoEfAP Final published version, 887 KB Licence: CC BY

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• Link to publication in Scopus

Titles in research articles. / Hyland, Ken ; Zou, Hang (Joanna) .

T1 - Titles in research articles

AU - Hyland, Ken

AU - Zou, Hang (Joanna)

PY - 2022/3

Y1 - 2022/3

N2 - Titles are a key part of every academic genre and are particularly important in research papers. Today, online searches are overwhelmingly based on articles rather than journals which means that writers must, more than ever, make their titles both informative and appealing to attract readers who may go on to read, cite and make use of their research. In this paper we explore the key features of 5070 titles in the leading journals of six disciplines in the human and physical sciences to identify their typical structural patterns and content foci. In addition to proposing a model of title patterns, we show there are major disciplinary differences which can be traced to different characteristics of the fields and of the topics of the articles themselves. Our findings have important implications for EAP and ERPP teachers working with early career academic writers.

AB - Titles are a key part of every academic genre and are particularly important in research papers. Today, online searches are overwhelmingly based on articles rather than journals which means that writers must, more than ever, make their titles both informative and appealing to attract readers who may go on to read, cite and make use of their research. In this paper we explore the key features of 5070 titles in the leading journals of six disciplines in the human and physical sciences to identify their typical structural patterns and content foci. In addition to proposing a model of title patterns, we show there are major disciplinary differences which can be traced to different characteristics of the fields and of the topics of the articles themselves. Our findings have important implications for EAP and ERPP teachers working with early career academic writers.

KW - Academic writing

KW - Corpus analysis

KW - Disciplinary differences

KW - Research articles

KW - Titles

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124107194&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101094

DO - 10.1016/j.jeap.2022.101094

M3 - Article

JO - Journal of English for Academic Purposes

JF - Journal of English for Academic Purposes

SN - 1475-1585

M1 - 101094

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Writing the title and abstract for a research paper: Being concise, precise, and meticulous is the key

Milind s. tullu.

Department of Pediatrics, Seth G.S. Medical College and KEM Hospital, Parel, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

This article deals with formulating a suitable title and an appropriate abstract for an original research paper. The “title” and the “abstract” are the “initial impressions” of a research article, and hence they need to be drafted correctly, accurately, carefully, and meticulously. Often both of these are drafted after the full manuscript is ready. Most readers read only the title and the abstract of a research paper and very few will go on to read the full paper. The title and the abstract are the most important parts of a research paper and should be pleasant to read. The “title” should be descriptive, direct, accurate, appropriate, interesting, concise, precise, unique, and should not be misleading. The “abstract” needs to be simple, specific, clear, unbiased, honest, concise, precise, stand-alone, complete, scholarly, (preferably) structured, and should not be misrepresentative. The abstract should be consistent with the main text of the paper, especially after a revision is made to the paper and should include the key message prominently. It is very important to include the most important words and terms (the “keywords”) in the title and the abstract for appropriate indexing purpose and for retrieval from the search engines and scientific databases. Such keywords should be listed after the abstract. One must adhere to the instructions laid down by the target journal with regard to the style and number of words permitted for the title and the abstract.

Introduction

This article deals with drafting a suitable “title” and an appropriate “abstract” for an original research paper. Because the “title” and the “abstract” are the “initial impressions” or the “face” of a research article, they need to be drafted correctly, accurately, carefully, meticulously, and consume time and energy.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ] Often, these are drafted after the complete manuscript draft is ready.[ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 9 , 10 , 11 ] Most readers will read only the title and the abstract of a published research paper, and very few “interested ones” (especially, if the paper is of use to them) will go on to read the full paper.[ 1 , 2 ] One must remember to adhere to the instructions laid down by the “target journal” (the journal for which the author is writing) regarding the style and number of words permitted for the title and the abstract.[ 2 , 4 , 5 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 12 ] Both the title and the abstract are the most important parts of a research paper – for editors (to decide whether to process the paper for further review), for reviewers (to get an initial impression of the paper), and for the readers (as these may be the only parts of the paper available freely and hence, read widely).[ 4 , 8 , 12 ] It may be worth for the novice author to browse through titles and abstracts of several prominent journals (and their target journal as well) to learn more about the wording and styles of the titles and abstracts, as well as the aims and scope of the particular journal.[ 5 , 7 , 9 , 13 ]

The details of the title are discussed under the subheadings of importance, types, drafting, and checklist.

Importance of the title

When a reader browses through the table of contents of a journal issue (hard copy or on website), the title is the “ first detail” or “face” of the paper that is read.[ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 13 ] Hence, it needs to be simple, direct, accurate, appropriate, specific, functional, interesting, attractive/appealing, concise/brief, precise/focused, unambiguous, memorable, captivating, informative (enough to encourage the reader to read further), unique, catchy, and it should not be misleading.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 9 , 12 ] It should have “just enough details” to arouse the interest and curiosity of the reader so that the reader then goes ahead with studying the abstract and then (if still interested) the full paper.[ 1 , 2 , 4 , 13 ] Journal websites, electronic databases, and search engines use the words in the title and abstract (the “keywords”) to retrieve a particular paper during a search; hence, the importance of these words in accessing the paper by the readers has been emphasized.[ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 12 , 14 ] Such important words (or keywords) should be arranged in appropriate order of importance as per the context of the paper and should be placed at the beginning of the title (rather than the later part of the title, as some search engines like Google may just display only the first six to seven words of the title).[ 3 , 5 , 12 ] Whimsical, amusing, or clever titles, though initially appealing, may be missed or misread by the busy reader and very short titles may miss the essential scientific words (the “keywords”) used by the indexing agencies to catch and categorize the paper.[ 1 , 3 , 4 , 9 ] Also, amusing or hilarious titles may be taken less seriously by the readers and may be cited less often.[ 4 , 15 ] An excessively long or complicated title may put off the readers.[ 3 , 9 ] It may be a good idea to draft the title after the main body of the text and the abstract are drafted.[ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]

Types of titles

Titles can be descriptive, declarative, or interrogative. They can also be classified as nominal, compound, or full-sentence titles.

Descriptive or neutral title

This has the essential elements of the research theme, that is, the patients/subjects, design, interventions, comparisons/control, and outcome, but does not reveal the main result or the conclusion.[ 3 , 4 , 12 , 16 ] Such a title allows the reader to interpret the findings of the research paper in an impartial manner and with an open mind.[ 3 ] These titles also give complete information about the contents of the article, have several keywords (thus increasing the visibility of the article in search engines), and have increased chances of being read and (then) being cited as well.[ 4 ] Hence, such descriptive titles giving a glimpse of the paper are generally preferred.[ 4 , 16 ]

Declarative title

This title states the main finding of the study in the title itself; it reduces the curiosity of the reader, may point toward a bias on the part of the author, and hence is best avoided.[ 3 , 4 , 12 , 16 ]

Interrogative title

This is the one which has a query or the research question in the title.[ 3 , 4 , 16 ] Though a query in the title has the ability to sensationalize the topic, and has more downloads (but less citations), it can be distracting to the reader and is again best avoided for a research article (but can, at times, be used for a review article).[ 3 , 6 , 16 , 17 ]

From a sentence construct point of view, titles may be nominal (capturing only the main theme of the study), compound (with subtitles to provide additional relevant information such as context, design, location/country, temporal aspect, sample size, importance, and a provocative or a literary; for example, see the title of this review), or full-sentence titles (which are longer and indicate an added degree of certainty of the results).[ 4 , 6 , 9 , 16 ] Any of these constructs may be used depending on the type of article, the key message, and the author's preference or judgement.[ 4 ]

Drafting a suitable title

A stepwise process can be followed to draft the appropriate title. The author should describe the paper in about three sentences, avoiding the results and ensuring that these sentences contain important scientific words/keywords that describe the main contents and subject of the paper.[ 1 , 4 , 6 , 12 ] Then the author should join the sentences to form a single sentence, shorten the length (by removing redundant words or adjectives or phrases), and finally edit the title (thus drafted) to make it more accurate, concise (about 10–15 words), and precise.[ 1 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 9 ] Some journals require that the study design be included in the title, and this may be placed (using a colon) after the primary title.[ 2 , 3 , 4 , 14 ] The title should try to incorporate the Patients, Interventions, Comparisons and Outcome (PICO).[ 3 ] The place of the study may be included in the title (if absolutely necessary), that is, if the patient characteristics (such as study population, socioeconomic conditions, or cultural practices) are expected to vary as per the country (or the place of the study) and have a bearing on the possible outcomes.[ 3 , 6 ] Lengthy titles can be boring and appear unfocused, whereas very short titles may not be representative of the contents of the article; hence, optimum length is required to ensure that the title explains the main theme and content of the manuscript.[ 4 , 5 , 9 ] Abbreviations (except the standard or commonly interpreted ones such as HIV, AIDS, DNA, RNA, CDC, FDA, ECG, and EEG) or acronyms should be avoided in the title, as a reader not familiar with them may skip such an article and nonstandard abbreviations may create problems in indexing the article.[ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 9 , 12 ] Also, too much of technical jargon or chemical formulas in the title may confuse the readers and the article may be skipped by them.[ 4 , 9 ] Numerical values of various parameters (stating study period or sample size) should also be avoided in the titles (unless deemed extremely essential).[ 4 ] It may be worthwhile to take an opinion from a impartial colleague before finalizing the title.[ 4 , 5 , 6 ] Thus, multiple factors (which are, at times, a bit conflicting or contrasting) need to be considered while formulating a title, and hence this should not be done in a hurry.[ 4 , 6 ] Many journals ask the authors to draft a “short title” or “running head” or “running title” for printing in the header or footer of the printed paper.[ 3 , 12 ] This is an abridged version of the main title of up to 40–50 characters, may have standard abbreviations, and helps the reader to navigate through the paper.[ 3 , 12 , 14 ]

Checklist for a good title

Table 1 gives a checklist/useful tips for drafting a good title for a research paper.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 12 ] Table 2 presents some of the titles used by the author of this article in his earlier research papers, and the appropriateness of the titles has been commented upon. As an individual exercise, the reader may try to improvise upon the titles (further) after reading the corresponding abstract and full paper.

Checklist/useful tips for drafting a good title for a research paper

Some titles used by author of this article in his earlier publications and remark/comment on their appropriateness

The Abstract

The details of the abstract are discussed under the subheadings of importance, types, drafting, and checklist.

Importance of the abstract

The abstract is a summary or synopsis of the full research paper and also needs to have similar characteristics like the title. It needs to be simple, direct, specific, functional, clear, unbiased, honest, concise, precise, self-sufficient, complete, comprehensive, scholarly, balanced, and should not be misleading.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 13 , 17 ] Writing an abstract is to extract and summarize (AB – absolutely, STR – straightforward, ACT – actual data presentation and interpretation).[ 17 ] The title and abstracts are the only sections of the research paper that are often freely available to the readers on the journal websites, search engines, and in many abstracting agencies/databases, whereas the full paper may attract a payment per view or a fee for downloading the pdf copy.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 7 , 8 , 10 , 11 , 13 , 14 ] The abstract is an independent and stand-alone (that is, well understood without reading the full paper) section of the manuscript and is used by the editor to decide the fate of the article and to choose appropriate reviewers.[ 2 , 7 , 10 , 12 , 13 ] Even the reviewers are initially supplied only with the title and the abstract before they agree to review the full manuscript.[ 7 , 13 ] This is the second most commonly read part of the manuscript, and therefore it should reflect the contents of the main text of the paper accurately and thus act as a “real trailer” of the full article.[ 2 , 7 , 11 ] The readers will go through the full paper only if they find the abstract interesting and relevant to their practice; else they may skip the paper if the abstract is unimpressive.[ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 13 ] The abstract needs to highlight the selling point of the manuscript and succeed in luring the reader to read the complete paper.[ 3 , 7 ] The title and the abstract should be constructed using keywords (key terms/important words) from all the sections of the main text.[ 12 ] Abstracts are also used for submitting research papers to a conference for consideration for presentation (as oral paper or poster).[ 9 , 13 , 17 ] Grammatical and typographic errors reflect poorly on the quality of the abstract, may indicate carelessness/casual attitude on part of the author, and hence should be avoided at all times.[ 9 ]

Types of abstracts

The abstracts can be structured or unstructured. They can also be classified as descriptive or informative abstracts.

Structured and unstructured abstracts

Structured abstracts are followed by most journals, are more informative, and include specific subheadings/subsections under which the abstract needs to be composed.[ 1 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 13 , 17 , 18 ] These subheadings usually include context/background, objectives, design, setting, participants, interventions, main outcome measures, results, and conclusions.[ 1 ] Some journals stick to the standard IMRAD format for the structure of the abstracts, and the subheadings would include Introduction/Background, Methods, Results, And (instead of Discussion) the Conclusion/s.[ 1 , 2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 17 , 18 ] Structured abstracts are more elaborate, informative, easy to read, recall, and peer-review, and hence are preferred; however, they consume more space and can have same limitations as an unstructured abstract.[ 7 , 9 , 18 ] The structured abstracts are (possibly) better understood by the reviewers and readers. Anyway, the choice of the type of the abstract and the subheadings of a structured abstract depend on the particular journal style and is not left to the author's wish.[ 7 , 10 , 12 ] Separate subheadings may be necessary for reporting meta-analysis, educational research, quality improvement work, review, or case study.[ 1 ] Clinical trial abstracts need to include the essential items mentioned in the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards Of Reporting Trials) guidelines.[ 7 , 9 , 14 , 19 ] Similar guidelines exist for various other types of studies, including observational studies and for studies of diagnostic accuracy.[ 20 , 21 ] A useful resource for the above guidelines is available at www.equator-network.org (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research). Unstructured (or non-structured) abstracts are free-flowing, do not have predefined subheadings, and are commonly used for papers that (usually) do not describe original research.[ 1 , 7 , 9 , 10 ]

The four-point structured abstract: This has the following elements which need to be properly balanced with regard to the content/matter under each subheading:[ 9 ]

Background and/or Objectives: This states why the work was undertaken and is usually written in just a couple of sentences.[ 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 ] The hypothesis/study question and the major objectives are also stated under this subheading.[ 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 ]

Methods: This subsection is the longest, states what was done, and gives essential details of the study design, setting, participants, blinding, sample size, sampling method, intervention/s, duration and follow-up, research instruments, main outcome measures, parameters evaluated, and how the outcomes were assessed or analyzed.[ 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 17 ]

Results/Observations/Findings: This subheading states what was found, is longer, is difficult to draft, and needs to mention important details including the number of study participants, results of analysis (of primary and secondary objectives), and include actual data (numbers, mean, median, standard deviation, “P” values, 95% confidence intervals, effect sizes, relative risks, odds ratio, etc.).[ 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 17 ]

Conclusions: The take-home message (the “so what” of the paper) and other significant/important findings should be stated here, considering the interpretation of the research question/hypothesis and results put together (without overinterpreting the findings) and may also include the author's views on the implications of the study.[ 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 17 ]

The eight-point structured abstract: This has the following eight subheadings – Objectives, Study Design, Study Setting, Participants/Patients, Methods/Intervention, Outcome Measures, Results, and Conclusions.[ 3 , 9 , 18 ] The instructions to authors given by the particular journal state whether they use the four- or eight-point abstract or variants thereof.[ 3 , 14 ]

Descriptive and Informative abstracts

Descriptive abstracts are short (75–150 words), only portray what the paper contains without providing any more details; the reader has to read the full paper to know about its contents and are rarely used for original research papers.[ 7 , 10 ] These are used for case reports, reviews, opinions, and so on.[ 7 , 10 ] Informative abstracts (which may be structured or unstructured as described above) give a complete detailed summary of the article contents and truly reflect the actual research done.[ 7 , 10 ]

Drafting a suitable abstract

It is important to religiously stick to the instructions to authors (format, word limit, font size/style, and subheadings) provided by the journal for which the abstract and the paper are being written.[ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 13 ] Most journals allow 200–300 words for formulating the abstract and it is wise to restrict oneself to this word limit.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 22 ] Though some authors prefer to draft the abstract initially, followed by the main text of the paper, it is recommended to draft the abstract in the end to maintain accuracy and conformity with the main text of the paper (thus maintaining an easy linkage/alignment with title, on one hand, and the introduction section of the main text, on the other hand).[ 2 , 7 , 9 , 10 , 11 ] The authors should check the subheadings (of the structured abstract) permitted by the target journal, use phrases rather than sentences to draft the content of the abstract, and avoid passive voice.[ 1 , 7 , 9 , 12 ] Next, the authors need to get rid of redundant words and edit the abstract (extensively) to the correct word count permitted (every word in the abstract “counts”!).[ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 13 ] It is important to ensure that the key message, focus, and novelty of the paper are not compromised; the rationale of the study and the basis of the conclusions are clear; and that the abstract is consistent with the main text of the paper.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 7 , 9 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 17 , 22 ] This is especially important while submitting a revision of the paper (modified after addressing the reviewer's comments), as the changes made in the main (revised) text of the paper need to be reflected in the (revised) abstract as well.[ 2 , 10 , 12 , 14 , 22 ] Abbreviations should be avoided in an abstract, unless they are conventionally accepted or standard; references, tables, or figures should not be cited in the abstract.[ 7 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 13 ] It may be worthwhile not to rush with the abstract and to get an opinion by an impartial colleague on the content of the abstract; and if possible, the full paper (an “informal” peer-review).[ 1 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 11 , 17 ] Appropriate “Keywords” (three to ten words or phrases) should follow the abstract and should be preferably chosen from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) list of the U.S. National Library of Medicine ( https://meshb.nlm.nih.gov/search ) and are used for indexing purposes.[ 2 , 3 , 11 , 12 ] These keywords need to be different from the words in the main title (the title words are automatically used for indexing the article) and can be variants of the terms/phrases used in the title, or words from the abstract and the main text.[ 3 , 12 ] The ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors; http://www.icmje.org/ ) also recommends publishing the clinical trial registration number at the end of the abstract.[ 7 , 14 ]

Checklist for a good abstract

Table 3 gives a checklist/useful tips for formulating a good abstract for a research paper.[ 1 , 2 , 3 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 17 , 22 ]

Checklist/useful tips for formulating a good abstract for a research paper

Concluding Remarks

This review article has given a detailed account of the importance and types of titles and abstracts. It has also attempted to give useful hints for drafting an appropriate title and a complete abstract for a research paper. It is hoped that this review will help the authors in their career in medical writing.

Financial support and sponsorship

Conflicts of interest.

There are no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Dr. Hemant Deshmukh - Dean, Seth G.S. Medical College & KEM Hospital, for granting permission to publish this manuscript.

• Open access
• Published: 21 October 2014

Title and Abstract Screening and Evaluation in Systematic Reviews (TASER): a pilot randomised controlled trial of title and abstract screening by medical students

• Lauren Ng 1 ,
• Veronica Pitt 2 ,
• Kit Huckvale 3 ,
• Ornella Clavisi 2 ,
• Tari Turner 1 , 4 ,
• Russell Gruen 2 &
• Julian H Elliott 5 , 6  

Systematic Reviews volume  3 , Article number:  121 ( 2014 ) Cite this article

13k Accesses

15 Citations

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Metrics details

The production of high quality systematic reviews requires rigorous methods that are time-consuming and resource intensive. Citation screening is a key step in the systematic review process. An opportunity to improve the efficiency of systematic review production involves the use of non-expert groups and new technologies for citation screening. We performed a pilot study of citation screening by medical students using four screening methods and compared students’ performance to experienced review authors.

The aims of this pilot randomised controlled trial were to provide preliminary data on the accuracy of title and abstract screening by medical students, and on the effect of screening modality on screening accuracy and efficiency. Medical students were randomly allocated to title and abstract screening using one of the four modalities and required to screen 650 citations from a single systematic review update. The four screening modalities were a reference management software program (EndNote), Paper, a web-based systematic review workflow platform (ReGroup) and a mobile screening application (Screen2Go). Screening sensitivity and specificity were analysed in a complete case analysis using a chi-squared test and Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test according to screening modality and compared to a final set of included citations selected by expert review authors.

Sensitivity of medical students’ screening decisions ranged from 46.7% to 66.7%, with students using the web-based platform performing significantly better than the paper-based group. Specificity ranged from 93.2% to 97.4% with the lowest specificity seen with the web-based platform. There was no significant difference in performance between the other three modalities.

Conclusions

Medical students are a feasible population to engage in citation screening. Future studies should investigate the effect of incentive systems, training and support and analytical methods on screening performance.

Systematic review registration

Cochrane Database CD001048

Peer Review reports

The continuing exponential growth in published biomedical research presents a daunting challenge for clinicians and others involved in health care [ 1 ]. It is increasingly difficult for health care decision-makers to find and appraise research evidence, leading to lost opportunities to translate research investment into health care practice improvement [ 2 ] and reducing their utility for clinicians and policymakers. Systematic reviews that collate a body of literature present a high quality resource for health care decision-making but involve a significant investment in time and effort, usually by small groups of skilled individuals.

A key step in the process of systematic review is citation screening, which involves manual review of study report titles and abstracts to identify potentially eligible articles for inclusion in the review [ 3 ]. Citation screening is time-consuming yet a crucial aspect of the systematic review process, since failure to identify relevant studies can jeopardise the validity of a review. In order to increase the reliability of article selection, the use of two reviewers has been recommended [ 4 ], but this increases the resource requirements of review production.

One approach to improving the timeliness and efficiency of systematic review production in order to maximise its relevancy to clinicians and policymakers is to extend the population of contributors beyond traditional review authors. By engaging a broader community in systematic review production, the total pool of available human resource for review production is increased. This may lead to efficiency gains and is consistent with the efforts to broaden the involvement of stakeholders in the production and use of evidence synthesis. Whilst previous studies have assessed the effect of experience on the accuracy of data extraction [ 5 ], there is no empirical evidence regarding the performance of non-expert groups in citation screening or the optimal approaches to support their contributions. To be feasible, methods will be needed to engage and train these screeners, allocate workload, support a decentralised screening process and subsequently aggregate individual screening decisions.

Medical students may be an appropriate group to engage in citation screening for systematic reviews in health care. Medical training confers domain-specific knowledge, and students show interest in getting involved in ‘real world’ academic projects. To explore the feasibility of engaging students in citation screening, we compared the performance of student screeners against expert judgments for a single review. We hypothesised that the modality or technology used for screening may effect the accuracy or efficiency and therefore compared student screening performance using four alternative screening modalities.

Study design

The objectives of the Title and Abstract Screening and Evaluation in Systematic Reviews (TASER) trial were to provide preliminary data on the accuracy of medical student title and abstract screening and on the effect of screening modality on screening accuracy and efficiency. Medical students were randomly allocated to title and abstract screening using one of the four modalities.

We restricted the scope of our study to title and abstract screening using a uniform approach to the whole set of citations as this is the most common approach to citation screening. We did not include screening of full-text articles, the second step in study identification, as the characteristics of this task differs substantially from citation screening.

Participant eligibility and recruitment

Students enrolled in a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in third year and above, or undertaking a research year as part of a Bachelor of Medical Science were eligible for inclusion in the study. All students had received some training in the development of critical appraisal skills within the first 2 years of their study but did not have any previous experience in undertaking systematic reviews. The Monash University Faculty of Medicine distributed an invitation email to a convenience sample of the 1,148 eligible medical students with an explanatory statement to eligible participants using student email lists. All student participants were required to have access to an iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad), in addition to a computer with Internet access. Students were offered a double movie ticket and a certificate of participation for their involvement. The study ran from June to August 2012.

Screening modalities

The four screening modalities included in this study were the following:

EndNote X5 [ 6 ], a computer-based reference management software program in which students clicked on each citation to indicate whether the citation was assessed as potentially relevant or not.

Paper, printed with titles and abstracts in a list and students highlighted relevant articles.

ReGroup [ 7 ], a web-based systematic review platform, which presents titles and abstracts in a list view. Users click on buttons placed next to each citation to indicate whether they have assessed the citation as potentially relevant or not.

Screen2Go [ 8 ], an iOS mobile citation screening application. Citations are presented to the user on the screen of the mobile device and they click on a button to indicate whether the citation is a potentially relevant study or not.

Randomisation and training

A randomisation schedule was created using Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, USA) by an independent investigator. Participants were randomised 1:1:1:1 to one of the four study arms according to the concealed randomisation schedule, as they responded to the invitation email. All participants were emailed with details of how to access their randomised screening modality and a one-page summary (refer to Additional file 1 ) of the systematic review protocol.

Students in the hard copy print-out group received the citations via post and were provided with highlighters to allocate citations. The EndNote and Screen2Go groups required specific downloading instructions to access the screening programs. EndNote X5 was accessible to students through the Monash University Library website. Screen2Go was undergoing beta testing during the study and required students to download two applications: an application to manage the test user installation process and the Screen2Go application itself. Students allocated to ReGroup each received an individualised email with a web link to register an account. No further support was provided other than the one-page summary of the systematic review protocol with inclusion criteria.

Citation dataset and screening

A set of citations retrieved from a search conducted for the purpose of updating a single Cochrane systematic review, ‘hypothermia for traumatic brain injury’ [ 9 ], was used as the citation dataset. Six hundred fifty citations were obtained from the date of last search from 6 April 2009 until 12 May 2012.

Study participants were asked to screen the full citation set and, for each citation, decide whether it should be included or excluded from the review using a one-step process. Participants were instructed to include citations if, based on the title and abstract, it appeared to meet all the inclusion criteria of the systematic review protocol (Table  1 ). Participants were given an additional option of marking any citation falling broadly within the parameters of the review or containing insufficient information to make a firm decision as ‘unsure’.

Study outcomes

The primary outcomes of the study were the sensitivity and specificity of participant screening decisions compared to the screening decisions by two independent experienced systematic reviewers. Sensitivity indicates the ability of participants to correctly identify definitively relevant citations whilst specificity indicates minimising the inclusion of irrelevant citations that an expert reviewer would exclude at screening.

Sensitivity (‘final sensitivity’) was defined as the number of citations deemed relevant by the experienced reviewers (included in the final set of studies for the review update after both screening and full-text review) that were correctly identified by the student screener (true positives), divided by the number of true positives plus the number of citations included in the final set of studies by the experienced reviewers that were not included by the student (false negative). The screening specificity of participant screening decisions was defined as the number of citations excluded by the student that were also excluded from the final set of studies by the expert reviewers (true negative), divided by the number of true negatives plus the number of citations included by the student that were not deemed relevant by the experienced reviewers after both screening and full-text review (false positive).

Secondary outcomes were full-text burden (a measure of workload; the proportion of all citations kept for full-text review at the completion of screening) and the total time taken to screen the full citation set by medical student participants.

Statistical methods

We performed a complete case analysis of all participants who completed screening. We used a chi-squared test [ 10 ] to compare completion rates in each of the four modalities. Screening decisions were dichotomised for analysis by collapsing ‘include’ and ‘unsure’ assignments into a single category since, in practice, both would be carried forward for further consideration after title and abstract screening.

Screening specificity and burden were calculated for each participant from the confusion matrix of their screening decisions against the consensus screening decisions of the expert reviewers. Final sensitivity was calculated in a similar way against those articles ultimately selected for inclusion into the review update.

Simple descriptive statistics was used to summarise the distribution of observed performance by screening modality. Data were summarised using box-and-whisker plots with whiskers denoting minimum and maximum observed values, boxes delineating quartile ranges and, separately, data points indicating within-group means. Anticipating negative skew, particularly for specificity, we used non-parametric methods for statistical comparisons of screening modalities. For each of the primary outcomes, we used a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test [ 11 ] to compare all four modalities simultaneously. If a between-modality difference was seen for a particular outcome, we compared each against the EndNote modality representing current standard practice using the Mann-Whitney U test [ 12 ]. To compensate for multiple comparisons, we used a sequential Bonferroni correction [ 13 ] to adjust a pre-specified significance level of 5%. Because the magnitude of this correction differs for each comparison, we report the effective required significance level in addition to the p value that was obtained. If the Kruskal-Wallis test showed no significant difference between groups, then pairwise comparisons were not performed.

Participants in the EndNote, ReGroup and Paper screening groups were requested to self-report the time taken to screen the 650 citations. The Screen2Go program recorded time taken directly by tracking the time during which the software was being used for screening by participants. We examined the relationship between final sensitivity and screening time for the Screen2Go objective timings by calculating the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient [ 14 ].

Ethics approval, consent and registration

Ethics approval for the project was obtained from the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (CF 12/1398-2012000738). Participants were provided with an explanatory statement detailing the study and its purpose. Response to the invitation email and completion of citation screening implied participant consent. The study followed an a priori protocol and was not registered as there were no patient participants.

A total of 76 students were randomised into four screening groups (Figure  1 ). Baseline demographic data was not obtained. Eighteen participants did not complete screening and were not included in the analysis, leaving 58 participants with evaluable data. The proportion of participants completing citation screening did not differ between study arms ( p =0.113).

CONSORT flow diagram showing the recruitment processes and losses at each stage.

Primary outcomes: final sensitivity and screening specificity

Within-group median final sensitivity ranged from 46.7% to 66.7% (Figure  2 a) and median screening specificity ranged from 93.2% to 97.4% (Figure  2 b). Participants in the ReGroup modality demonstrated the highest median sensitivity and the lowest specificity. Kruskal-Wallis tests indicated a significant difference between at least one modality for final sensitivity ( p =0.015) but not for specificity ( p =0.147). We therefore conducted pairwise comparison of sensitivity, but not specificity, between the EndNote modality and the other methods. Compared to the EndNote modality, ReGroup sensitivity was significantly higher ( p =0.005, required significance level after correction =0.017). Differences between Paper and EndNote ( p =0.689, significance level =0.05) and Screen2Go and EndNote (sensitivity p =0.064, significance level =0.025) were non-significant.The highest sensitivities and specificities observed in any single participant were 86.7% and 99.8%, respectively. No participant identified all 14 articles selected for inclusion in the review. Figure  3 illustrates the variability in student screening decisions for each of these articles. The numbers of students correctly selecting each study ranged from 1 (2%, for Smith 2012) to 53 (91%, for Harris 2009).

Student screening performance by modality. Plots (a) and (b) show the distribution of final sensitivities (a) and screening specificities (b) observed in each screening modality as well as the overall pooled distribution, using those study reports ultimately retained in the review update after full-text review as the reference standard. Panel (c) shows the burden for each modality calculated using those study reports retained at screening by expert reviewers as the reference standard. Burden is a measure of workload that captures the proportion of all citations that need to be reviewed once screening is completed. Whiskers represent the minimum and maximum values and boxes delimit quartile ranges. The centre line in each box is the median value.

Retrospective analysis of participant screening decisions for review authors’ final included citations. The figure summarises the distribution of responses across all students against the 14 citations that were ultimately retained into the review update after review of full text by the expert reviewers.

Screening burden

Screening burden varied from 5.3% to 10.8% (Figure  2 c). No significant difference was seen between groups ( p =0.053).

Total screening time

Students in the EndNote, Paper and ReGroup screening groups had median (range) self-reported total screening times of 3 h 30 min (range 01:50–08:00), 3 h 7 min and 30 s (range 02:20–06:41) and 3 h 30 min (range 02:50–07:50), respectively, equivalent to median screening times of 19 (range 10–40), 17 (range 12–37) and 19 s (range 13–41) per citation. Screen2Go captured objective timing information but included safeguards to discard timings when it was unclear if the device was being used for screening or not. As a result, complete timing information was available for only seven of the ten participants in this modality. Median screening time was 3 h 1 min (range 01:15–05:27), equivalent to 17 s (range 7–30) per citation. Spearman’s rho for rank correlation between final sensitivity and total screening times showed a weak positive correlation (rho =0.342) not significantly different from 0 ( p =0.452).

We performed a pilot randomised controlled trial to compare the performance characteristics of systematic review citation screening by medical students utilising four different screening modalities. Overall, student performance was highly variable and below that of experienced review authors. The use of ReGroup, a web-based systematic review platform, was associated with improved final sensitivity and lower screening sensitivity. Time to screen 650 citations was also highly variable, but did not differ significantly between groups and was not associated with screening sensitivity. There were no other significant differences between groups.

There are several potential reasons for the modest and variable overall performance of medical students’ ability to select relevant articles in this study, when compared to the review authors’ decisions. Firstly, we trialled a minimalist and easily scalable model where students did not receive any training in citation screening as part of the study. All students had received some general training in evidence-based medicine during their medical course, but this did not include specific training in the conduct of systematic review. Future work should explore the effect of different forms of training and support on participant performance. Secondly, participants were given very little guidance in the content area of the review, other than a one-page review protocol with inclusion criteria. Students may have received some previous training in the management of traumatic brain injury, but the gap between their knowledge and that of the review authors is likely to have been substantial. Furthermore, the study was conducted on an update to a review that the review authors had originally conducted, which may have contributed to their expertise on the specific topic of the review. Thirdly, incentives for participation were not linked to the quality of screening decisions. This may have encouraged students to complete the screening as quickly as possible, without regard to the accuracy of their decisions. For example, the title and abstract of Fraser 2011 (refer to Additional file 2 ) presents information indicating this is a potential included study, but 80% of students screened this study out.

The primary endpoints of our study were the final sensitivity and screening specificity of citation screening. As with other screening tests, screening sensitivity is of greater importance than specificity to ensure relevant studies are not missed. Students randomised to perform citation screening using ReGroup, a web-based systematic review platform, achieved a significantly higher final sensitivity than those randomised to use EndNote, a widely used desktop reference management program. There were no differences in screening performance between the use of EndNote and either Paper or Screen2Go. The reasons for the improved sensitivity of the ReGroup platform are not clear, but may be related to the design of the user interface, which has been developed to improve the efficiency and experience of systematic review workflow, particularly less experienced users. As would be expected, this improved sensitivity was associated with reduced specificity, suggesting this modality may have lowered participants’ threshold for citation inclusion.

The proportion of participants completing the screening task was numerically higher in the ReGroup and Paper groups. This may be related to the ease of initiation of screening. Login details were emailed to participants randomised to ReGroup, who then simply needed to click on a web link and could immediately commence screening. Similarly, participants randomised to use paper could immediately start screening using the mailed print outs and highlighter pens, whereas those randomised to use EndNote or Screen2Go had to load specific software to their computer or iPhone, respectively.

Time taken to screen was measured across the four intervention groups to compare efficiency between the four modalities. This was similar across the four screening groups although analysis of this outcome is limited by differences in measurement technique. The objectively generated Screen2Go timings were numerically lower than the other three modalities. This may have been due to the improved efficiency of using a phone-based application or over-estimation of screening time with self-report.

There are some limitations to this study. The study was designed as a pilot study and the sample size limits the power of the study to detect small, but relevant differences. The selected study was based on a single Cochrane review update and the two independent expert reviewers had been involved in the original systematic review. Additionally, the medical students had received no prior training and were recruited from a single university. These results may therefore not be generalisable to other forms of review activity, such as full-text review or data extraction or to other groups of potential screeners, such as affected individuals and families. Intention to treat analysis is considered the gold standard in randomised controlled trials to overcome non-compliance and missed outcomes [ 15 ]. In our study, primary outcomes are presented as a complete case analysis as this study was a pilot study assessing the feasibility of engaging medical students in citation screening and this approach to analysis is commonly employed in studies of this type.

Future work in this area may assist in investigating ways to optimise the performance of medical students, such as engaging and scalable training, incentives for quality and analytical approaches to deriving the most value from participants’ screening decisions. ‘Crowdsourcing’ citation screening from the general population is another approach to broader participation in systematic review and is an important area for further investigation.

In summary, the TASER study demonstrated the feasibility of engaging medical students in the screening of citations for systematic reviews. Sensitivity of screening decisions was improved with the use of ReGroup, a web-based systematic review platform, but were otherwise similar across the four modalities studied. Students’ screening performance was modest and highly variable and opportunities exist for improvement with different incentive structures, training and support and alternative analytical approaches. In order to maximise the efficiency of systematic review production, we recommend further investigation into the use of non-expert groups and new technologies for citation screening.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Emma Sydenham and Dr. Phil Alderson for their contribution as the authors of the systematic review update used in the study. This research did not receive any grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial and not-for-profit sectors.

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Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3168, Australia

Lauren Ng & Tari Turner

National Trauma Research Institute, 85-89 Commercial Rd, Melbourne, VIC, 3004, Australia

Veronica Pitt, Ornella Clavisi & Russell Gruen

Global eHealth Unit, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London, SW7 2AZ, UK

Kit Huckvale

World Vision Australia, 1 Vision Drive, Burwood East, Melbourne, VIC, 3151, Australia

Tari Turner

Department of Infectious Diseases, Alfred Hospital and Monash University, 2nd Floor, Burnet Tower, Alfred Hospital, Commercial Road, Melbourne, VIC, 3004, Australia

Julian H Elliott

Australasian Cochrane Centre, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, 99 Commercial Road, Melbourne, VIC, 3004, Australia

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Correspondence to Julian H Elliott .

Additional information

Competing interests.

We declare the following interests: KH is the creator of the mobile screening application, Screen2Go. OC, TT, RG and JHE are the creators of the web-based systematic review program, ReGroup.

Authors’ contributions

LN and VP participated in the study design, recruitment of study participants and data collection and assisted in the drafting of the manuscript. KH designed the mobile screening application, Screen2Go, and participated in the study’s statistical analysis and drafting of the manuscript. OC and TT designed the web-based systematic review program, ReGroup, and assisted in drafting the manuscript. RG participated in the design of the study and drafting the manuscript. JE conceived the study, participated in its coordination and design and assisted in drafting the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Electronic supplementary material

13643_2014_292_moesm1_esm.pdf.

Additional file 1: Therapeutic hypothermia in head injury protocol. All study participants received this file at the commencement of the study to provide background on the systematic review and inclusion criteria for relevant citations. (PDF 44 KB)

13643_2014_292_MOESM2_ESM.pdf

Additional file 2: Title and abstract of Fraser 2011 and Harris 2009. The file illustrates the variable amount and clarity of information between citations. (PDF 38 KB)

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Ng, L., Pitt, V., Huckvale, K. et al. Title and Abstract Screening and Evaluation in Systematic Reviews (TASER): a pilot randomised controlled trial of title and abstract screening by medical students. Syst Rev 3 , 121 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/2046-4053-3-121

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• Systematic review
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Quoted speech in linguistics research article titles: patterns of use and effects on citations

• Open access
• Published: 16 February 2021
• Volume 126 , pages 3421–3442, ( 2021 )

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• William S. Pearson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0768-8461 1  

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This paper investigates the uses and scholarly impact of quoted/direct speech in research article titles (e.g., "I Know I'm Generalizing but…": How Teachers' Perceptions Influence ESL Learner Placement ) across the 50 highest-listed linguistics journals according to Clarivate Analytics’ inCites Journal Citation Reports . The aims of the study were to: (1) uncover the prevalence of titles featuring quoted speech between 1980 and 2019, (2) describe how directly reported speech is utilised structurally in article titles, and (3) investigate the effects of various patterns of use of quotations on articles’ age-weighted citation rates. 640 linguistics articles with speech act titles were uncovered, occurring with an incidence of 1.8% in the dataset ( n  = 36,438), although their prevalence has risen significantly since 2004. Structural analysis revealed 90.9% of quotations were contained in the first segment of a compound title, serving to create an information gap (often for the purposes of provoking interest or intrigue), which is resolved in the second segment; the research article’s topic. Regression analysis showed that speech act titles were significant negative determinants of articles’ age-weighted citations, particularly the prevalent pattern of compound structures featuring a quotation phrased as a declarative. The length of the quotation was found to exert no significant effect, although quotations that were not marked by single or double quotation marks were found to have an especially suppressed scholarly impact.

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Introduction

As the first point of contact between the author and readers, the title of a research article plays an important role in whether a paper gets retrieved and read (Hartley 2007 ; Li and Xu 2019 ; Nagano 2015 ; Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; Sahragard and Meihami 2016 ). Research article titles encompass two core pragmatic roles; to inform the reader of the content of the manuscript and to persuade them that it is something they need to read (Hartley 2005 ). This is not just important for the retrieval of published research by would-be readers, but also during initial submission to an academic journal and peer review, where the title may contribute to the determination of whether a paper is reviewed and/or published (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ). It has been found that relatively inconsequential title writing practices, such as the inclusion of non-alphanumeric characters, can impact on an article’s citations (Buter and van Raan 2011 ; Gnewuch and Wohlrabe 2017 ; Keating et al. 2019 ; Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; van Wesel et al. 2014 ). For these reasons, research article titles must be written carefully, with authors meticulously choosing appropriate syntactic forms that convey the unique knowledge contribution of the manuscript (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ). Given that many journals place restrictions on the number of words (Haggan 2004 ; Wang and Bai 2007 ), writing a ‘good’ title is considered a challenging prospect by many authors of research publications (Gesuato 2008 ).

As ‘advertisements’ seeking to secure ‘customers’ through the attractive and informative presentation of their ‘products’ (Haggan 2004 ), research article titles may be worded to include a range of attention-grabbing stylistic cues that go beyond mere description of the study (Keating et al. 2019 ). These include acronyms, puns, metaphors, unconventional words, colloquial language, exclamations, and questions (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ; Lockwood 2016 ; Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ). Such practices impact on how the reader interprets the title and therefore the content of the article itself, often adding emotion, judgement, humour, flippancy, confrontation, or intrigue to readers’ perceptions of the article (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ). Attention-grabbing stylistic cues constitute a deviation from the established norms of objectivity and parsimony in scientific writing (Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ), resulting in them sometimes being labelled as ‘defects’ or ‘inaccuracies’ (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ). As such, their use is controversial, and may adversely impact on an article’s scholarly impact, depending on the accepted discourse practices of the specific discipline (Nagano 2015 ; Nair and Gibbert 2016 ). However, eye-catching titles are more acceptable in the social sciences, particularly in linguistics, where exploring authentic language in use may be the objective of study or an importance source of evidence (i.e., in qualitative research).

One attention-grabbing stylistic cue that has gained traction in linguistics article titles is the inclusion of a directly reported speech act of a research participant (or possibly the researcher’s), generated through observation, semi-structured interviewing, diaries, document research, etc. (e.g., “ I think that is a better way to teach but…”: EFL teachers’ conflicting beliefs about grammar teaching ). As with the use of reported speech in the text body itself, its use is illustrative (Terry et al. 2017 ), serving to encapsulate the overall contribution of the research as well as summing up the author’s meta-comment on the study (Pułaczewska 2010 ). Quoted speech is often easy to identify in research article titles because it is explicitly marked by single or double inverted commas, and/or the quoted text is italicised. This is not always the case ( I didn't get the grade I need. Where's my solicitor?), while the same symbols are often employed to denote unconventional words or discipline-specific concepts ( Explaining the " natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition" in English: A meta-analysis of multiple determinants ). Few informetric studies have described the patterns of use of directly reporting the speech of research participants in article titles (referred to as speech act titles) in any discipline (see Pułaczewska 2010 ), and none could be retrieved investigating the effects of such a stylistic cue on articles’ scholarly impact. The present study seeks to address both gaps in the extent literature on research article titles.

Literature Review

Research article titles.

A growing body of informetric studies has investigated corpora of research article titles across various disciplines. Much of this research encompasses description and analysis of prevalent linguistic structures, such as frequencies of particular syntactic structures (e.g., noun phrases, question forms, compounding) (Cheng et al. 2012 ; Gesuato 2008 ; Haggan 2004 ; Moattarian and Alibabaee 2015 ; Nagano 2007 ; Soler 2007 ; Xiang and Li 2019 ; Xie 2020 ), sentence types (e.g., declarative, interrogative) (Cheng et al. 2012 ; Pearson 2020b ), usages of lexicogrammatical items (e.g., the ) (Nagano 2013 ; Pearson 2020a ), attention-grabbing stylistic cues (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ; Busch-Lauer 2000 ; Keating et al. 2019 ; Mungra 2007 ; Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ; Subotic and Mukherjee 2014 ), and the presence of non-alphanumeric characters (Buter and van Raan 2011 ; Fumani et al. 2015 ; Gnewuch and Wohlrabe 2017 ; Pearson 2020b ; van Wesel et al. 2014 ; Wang and Bai 2007 ). Furthermore, out of concern over balancing the competing aims of informativeness and attractiveness (Hartley 2005 ), examining the length of titles (measured in characters or words) has been an on-going concern of titlelogical structural analyses (Guo et al. 2018 ; Letchford et al. 2015 ; Lewison and Hartley 2005 ; Li and Xu 2019 ; Milojević 2017 ; Nagano 2015 ; Subotic and Mukherjee 2014 ). An additional descriptive approach focuses on the functions of title linguistic units, often the information the author chooses to include (e.g., the topic, method, source of data, scope of the study) and in what order (Anthony 2001 ; Cheng et al. 2012 ; Li and Xu 2019 ; Pearson 2020b ; Wang and Bai 2007 ). Cross-disciplinary research indicates the structural and functional patterning of research article titles varies significantly (Haggan 2004 ; Milojević 2017 ; Moattarian and Alibabaee 2015 ; Nagano 2015 ; Soler 2007 ), having arisen through habit and tradition, and not necessarily being fixed in time.

Descriptive studies of research article titles have yielded insights into how authors of linguistics papers structure their titles (often relative to other disciplines). Earlier studies found that linguistics titles tend to be short (7.9–8.8 words) compared to other fields (Haggan 2004 ; Soler 2007 ). Yet more recent investigations have shown authors are disposed towards longer, more informative titles (Cheng et al. 2012 ; Moattarian and Alibabaee 2015 ; Pearson 2020b ). Particularly prevalent are compound titles featuring a first segment containing the topic, followed by the scope of the research, the method, or additional description (Cheng et al. 2012 ; Moattarian and Alibabaee 2015 ; Pearson 2020b ). Titles that load information linearly through pre- and post-modified nouns into a concise nominal title are also popular (Cheng et al. 2012 ; Moattarian and Alibabaee 2015 ; Pearson 2020b ; Soler 2007 ). Linguistics has been targeted for descriptive studies of research article titles for a number of reasons. Since structural and functional analysis of units of language are a key concern of the discipline (notably in the sub-disciplines of syntax, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics), it is not surprising that there is interest in how language structures and functions are used to present research. Secondly, the discipline’s multi-disciplinary nature – with notable sub-strands including sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive linguistics (Arik 2015 ) – seems to reflect contemporary conceptions of the social sciences more broadly (Lei and Liao 2017 ), resulting in its selection in cross-disciplinary titlelogical research (see Haggan 2004 ; Moattarian and Alibabaee 2015 ; Soler 2007 ; Xie 2020 ).

A number of informetric research article title studies beyond the field of linguistics adopt a normative perspective; that is, by identifying certain structural or functional characteristics that correlate with scholarly impact, authors can adopt written practices to enhance the visibility, appreciation, or attention given to their published work (Nair and Gibbert 2016 ), with real world consequences for their academic careers (Aksnes et al. 2019 ; Bornmann et al. 2008 ). An important characteristic of titles featuring directly reported speech is that the presence of the quotation may result in a lengthy title. Regression analyses using a value derived from papers’ citations have shown that shorter titles across a variety of disciplines tend to gain more citations (Gnewuch and Wohlrabe 2017 ; Jamali and Nikzad 2011 ; Letchford et al. 2015 ; Paiva et al. 2012 ; Subotic and Mukherjee 2014 ), suggesting some readers value conciseness over loading a title with information about the study (methods, sources of data, findings). The results are not conclusive, however, with other studies finding a positive (Jacques and Sebire 2010 ; Milojević 2017 ) or no relationship (Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; Pearson 2020b ), perhaps because other readers appreciate the inclusion of such information when deciding to progress to the article’s abstract.

Another notable feature of speech act titles is the frequent explicit signposting of the quotation through single or double quotation marks, two among 29 non-alphanumeric characters employed in research article titles (Buter and van Raan 2011 ). Non-alphanumeric characters can contribute to increasing the length and complexity of titles, notably by compounding them into two (or even three) segments using a colon, question mark, or full-stop. Significant negative effects of non-alphanumeric characters on citations in various fields are indicated in the literature (Jamali and Nikzad 2011 ; Michelson 1994 ; Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; Paiva et al. 2012 ; Pearson 2020b ), although not consistently (Buter and van Raan 2011 ; Gnewuch and Wohlrabe 2017 ; Jacques and Sebire 2010 ). A plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that the scholarly impact of this titular characteristic is mediated by a range of factors, including disciplinary expectations (Milojević 2017 ; Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; van Wesel et al. 2014 ), journal prestige (Chokshi et al. 2016 ; Keating et al. 2019 ), and publication date (Guo et al. 2018 ). Alternatively, the reason could be methodological, with less externally valid studies analysing the effects of titular conventions outside of the context of variables intrinsic to the quality of the study (Nair and Gibbert 2016 ), e.g., source publication, reputation of the authors, methodology (Tahamtan et al. 2016 ).

The extant body of literature investigating the scholarly impact of attention-grabbing stylistic cues indicates authors should be cautious, owing to a subtle bias that exists within many disciplines against rhetorical devices that go beyond plain description of an article’s content (Keating et al. 2019 ). At best, attention-grabbers, such as humour (Subotic and Mukherjee 2014 ) and novelty words (Stremersch et al. 2007 ) do not seem to reward authors with additional citations, while at worst, it has been found the use of metaphor and alliteration (Keating et al. 2019 ), amusement (Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ), word play (Lockwood 2016 ), and obscure words (Thelwall 2017 ) may actually harm citation counts. Such stylistic cues could undermine authorial credibility in higher-ranking journals (Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ), being indicative of weaker methods, limited results, or uncompelling arguments (Keating et al. 2019 ). As with title length and the presence of non-alphanumeric characters, the effects on scholarly impact are likely mediated by the prestige of the journal and date of publication. This may not be a permanent state-of-affairs. The increasing dependence on electronic retrieval of research means readers likely depend more on keywords and article abstracts when making judgements of whether to retrieve an article. This might explain the growing diversification in how research article titles are presented to readers syntactically (Li and Xu 2019 ; Sahragard and Meihami 2016 ; Xiang and Li 2019 ), perhaps resulting in greater tolerance for unorthodox stylistic cues.

Quoted Speech in Research Article Titles

There are a number of notable syntactic patterns that characterise research participants’ directly reported speech in article titles. Quoted speech may encompass a full sentence utterance, for example, “You’re not welcome here”: A grounded theory of family distancing , or it can appear as noun, adverbial, or adjectival phrase fragment (“ A wise decision”: Pre-modification of discourse-organising nouns in L2 writing ). A notable prevalent feature is its use in compound structures, where the title is divided into two segments separated by a non-alphanumeric character, often a colon (Cheng et al. 2012 ; Lewison and Hartley 2005 ; van Wesel et al. 2014 ). The quotation usually acts as a cataphoric reference in the first segment of the compound, serving to create an information gap for the purposes of provoking interest, intrigue, or contemplation from the reader, who is satiated by the second segment where the research topic/concern is elaborated (Pułaczewska 2010 ). Rarely, the quotation encompasses the second segment ( The role of Xhosa in a South African prison: 'The situation is leading you' ), performing an anaphoric referential role. Compared with linear full sentence or nominal constructions, the juxtaposition of information inherent in compounded titles containing directly reported speech creates an inefficiency in information retrieval (Baicchi 2004 ), which may be speculated to harm an article’s scholarly impact, depending on disciplinary conventions.

The relationship between the speech act and topic segment in compound titles can be conceived in terms of contiguity. Contiguity denotes the use of a quotation to exemplify a genre or discourse of spoken or written language, explicitly or implicitly delineated in the topic segment of the title, for example, I'm sorry I said that: Apologies in young children's discourse and 'Use the active voice whenever possible': The impact of style guidelines in medical journals . The quotation itself is usually not critical to understanding the phenomenon being investigated, since the research is ‘explained’ in the keywords presented in the topic segment (Pułaczewska 2010 ). However, in non-contiguous structures the topic segment either does not contain an expression that identifies the genre or discourse of the speech act ("This is description, not film analysis": Semiotically mediating genre, conceptual formations, and text development ) or contains a referential expression whose relation to the speech act is not specified or cannot be inferred ( Tell me something I don't know: Decision makers' preference for advisors with unshared information ) (Pułaczewska 2010 ). Non-contiguous structures may place greater cognitive demands on the reader and could thus constitute a risky approach to title writing.

Incorporating directly reported speech into a title also serves a number of semantic purposes that allow the reader to infer the epistemological and methodological approaches of the researcher. By emphasising the authentic utterances of participants, likely garnered through interviewing or observational research, the author is signposting their study is underscored by the interpretive tradition, where real-world phenomena are studied in terms of the meanings attributed to them by people in context, realised in the spoken and written words they utilise (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012 ). It may be considered that speech act titles privilege a single research participant, by placing her/his words at the forefront of a research article. Nevertheless, participants may have little say in their words being used so prominently, while their utterances might not reflect the perspectives of other individuals in the study. Additionally, it must be acknowledged that not all quotations are genuine participant utterances. They may have been concocted by researchers, constituting the author’s idealised conception of what was said (Pułaczewska 2010 ).

No empirical research on the scholarly impact (i.e., the number of citations) of research article titles that feature directly reported speech versus those that do not could be uncovered in the literature review for this study. In the absence of studies on scholarly impact, it is worth considering the social influence of speech act titles. Pułaczewska ( 2010 ) asked two groups of graduate students ( n  = 18 and n  = 21) at a Polish university to select titles among a selection from the Journal of Pragmatics to discuss in seminars. She uncovered students’ preference for speech act titles, although this was in part due to a predilection towards compound structures. While such titles were found to be memorable, this did not mean the participants could recall the topics of the articles featuring speech act titles.

This study is undertaken to address the gap in research concerning the structural patterns of use of directly reported speech in linguistics research article titles and the effects on scholarly impact of their inclusion. The study is guided by the following three research questions:

1. Have the frequencies of speech act quotations in linguistics research article titles changed between 1980 and 2019?

2. What are the structural attributes of speech act titles in linguistics research articles?

3. What effects does directly reported speech have on the age-weighted citation rates of article titles that feature this stylistic cue, versus ones that do not?

The present study utilises a bespoke corpus of research article titles from 50 high-ranking linguistics journals across the forty-year time period, 1980–2019. To answer research question 1, frequencies and distributions of research article titles with and without speech act quotations are compared across six five-year intervals from 1980 to 2019. Following this, linguistics research articles containing directly reported speech are coded and analysed structurally according to six key variables, outlined in Table 1 . To address the third aim, regression analysis is undertaken to analyse the effects on citations of research articles featuring speech act titles and the six variables investigated in research question 2.

Data Retrieval

It was determined that a broad range of contemporary high-performing linguistics journals would constitute the sources of research article titles analysed in the present study (see “Appendix” for a list). This was to ensure the results reflected the practices of cutting-edge scholarship in the discipline. As such, the top 50 publications listed by Clarivate Analytics’ inCites Journal Citation Reports ‘journals by rank’ function for 2019 in the subject category of ‘linguistics’ were retrieved. Each publication name was searched in SCOPUS using the ‘source title’ function, which brings up all related content held for the respective publications.

The search results were narrowed according to three criteria. To ensure the dataset comprised only the titles of full-length research articles and not other genres of academic texts (e.g., conference presentations, reviews), the results were filtered to include only entries marked as ‘articles’ by SCOPUS. Secondly, the list of retrieved sources was limited to those published between 1980 and 2019. The cut-off year of 1980 was selected since not all linguistics journals published articles before this date, and those that did tended to mark announcements, editors’ notes, calls for papers, and awards as ‘articles’ in early publications. Such entries were removed from the 1980–2019 data during cleaning. Finally, owing to limitations in SCOPUS, no more than 2000 sources were retrieved for each publication counting backwards from 2019. This only affected the data retrieved from the high-volume publication Brain and Language , whose allocation was utilised in studies published between 2000–2019. Additionally, data from 1989–1999 for the journal ReCALL were excluded since it was not possible to automatically filter out the many software reviews from the search results. Data for each article, including its author(s), title, year of publication, starting page, ending page, and citation count were retrieved from SCOPUS using the ‘export to CSV’ function. The resulting dataset totalled 36,438 research articles and were saved as an Excel file for coding.

Data Coding and Analysis

Coding research article titles Identifying direct speech quotations in research article titles was not a straightforward task. The first step involved searching the dataset for instances of text contained within single or double quotation marks, which were carefully read to ensure they encompassed directly reported speech. Individual words or phrases that were located within single or double quotation marks that did not encompass quoted speech were ignored, as well as a number of instances where quotation marks were used to denote peculiar terms or phrases used in specialised ways (e.g., The "sense boost" to dative priming: Evidence for sense-specific verb-structure links ). The use of rhetorical questions ( Where is the bilingual advantage in task-switching?) were not considered speech act quotations, nor when structures were exemplified to illuminate a specific linguistic structure that was the focus of the inquiry ( "Have fun while you can," "You're only as old as you feel," and "Don't ever get old!": An examination of memorable messages about aging ). Since speech act quotations are not always marked in titles by the use of inverted commas, the library of titles was read and re-read to document occurrences of unmarked quotations.

To answer research question 2, six attributes of speech act titles were coded. First, the length of the quotation was the only variable automatically coded (using an Excel formula that calculated the number of words in each quotation). Next, the syntactic structures of titles featuring directly reported speech were manually coded by the researcher according to whether they were a compound (and if so, whether the quotation featured in the first or second segment) or full sentence construction. Following this, the syntactic pattern of the quotation was coded as clausal (and within this variable, declarative, interrogative, or imperative/exclamative), phrasal, or non-English. For the fourth variable, the constituent elements of compound structures were compared to identify whether they encompassed a contiguous or non-contiguous relationship. Finally, whether the quotation was marked by single/double quotation marks or neither was recorded in the spreadsheet. Ten per cent of titles featuring speech act quotations ( n  = 64) were subject to intra-rater reliability analysis to ensure consistency of coding. The four manually coded variables were recoded blind for these 64 titles, with the values compared to the originals by Excel formulae. The overall outcome of 0.95 indicated a high degree of intra-rater agreement, with most inconsistencies exhibited in the variable contiguity . This was because in some cases it was possible to infer the genre of the spoken or written quoted utterance, creating ambiguity. Discrepancies were attended to and the contiguity variable re-checked in the wider dataset.

Regression analysis To measure the effects on research article citations of speech act titles and the six attributes investigated in research question 2, stepwise regression analysis was undertaken (Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; Paiva et al. 2012 ). Initially, the attributes of speech act titles were converted into dummy variables. For example, in coding the variable speech act quotation , cases were marked with a ‘1′ if the title contained a quotation and ‘0′ if not. This procedure was applied to the categorical variables investigated for research question 2 ( title syntactic structure , quotation syntactic pattern , contiguity , and non-alphanumeric   marking ). The exact values (number of words) were utilised for the variable quotation length , with non-speech act titles left blank. For categorical variables with more than one value, one dummy variable was omitted to prevent perfect multicollinearity. In the case of title syntactic structure , this was full sentence structure , for quotation syntactic pattern it was the non-English pattern, for contiguity , non-compound structures that did not feature contiguity ( N/A ), and finally quotations featuring single apostrophes. The effects of the variables were investigated in combination with three control variables (see below) across six separate regression models (a-e). High levels of multicollinearity between certain variables prevented a meaningful integrated model.

Measure of citations Raw citation counts for the 36,438 research articles were downloaded from SCOPUS as one of the papers’ background characteristics. Citation counts were automatically computed into an age-weighted citation rate (AWCR) variable, calculated by dividing the articles’ total number of citations with the number of years since publication (with 2019 being denoted as one year old, 2018 two, etc.). This measure of citation frequency was adopted in order to account for scholarly impact over the whole course of a publication’s life (versus time window measures). However, one downside of the age-weighted citation rate is that it is punitive towards newer studies. To reduce this impact, articles published in 2018 and 2019 were excluded from the regression analysis.

Control variables Features of a research article’s title are generally considered to have a superficial impact on citations in comparison to paper- (e.g., quality, novelty, design and methods), journal- (impact factor, coverage, language), and author-related factors (reputation, affiliated institution, country) (Tahamtan et al. 2016 ; van Wesel et al. 2014 ). In order to obtain more accurate indications of the effects of titular characteristics, three control variables were incorporated into the regression models. These were the journal’s impact factor, the article’s age in years, and the length of the paper in pages. Impact factor values for 2019 were extracted from Clarivate Analytics as the journal’s performance in this year determined their inclusion in the study. Formulae were employed to calculate the age of an article (from the year data) and the length (end page minus start page). All three controls were found to be statistically significant predictors of citations, with impact factor and article length producing strong positive effects on citations (β = 0.11, p  < 0.001 and β = 0.13, p  < 0.001 respectively). Age was a significant negative determiner (β = -0.13, p  < 0.001), probably because citations peak in the first few years after publication before falling steadily (Tahamtan et al. 2016 ).

Prevalence of Quoted Speech in Linguistics Titles

Direct speech was found to be a rare phenomenon in the 36,438 linguistics research article titles. 640 instances were identified, accounting for just 1.8% of the dataset. As shown in Table 2 , speech act titles occurred far from linearly across the forty years of literature, and increased across all five-year intervals after 1980. Prior to the turn of the millennium, speech act titles were very rare, with no more than 35 instances per each five-year interval. This accounted for 1.5% or less of all research article titles investigated. It can be seen their use significantly expanded in 2005–2009 to 1.8% of all titles and again in 2015–2019 to 2.3%. Reinforcing speech act quotations as a relatively contemporaneous title writing convention in linguistics is the finding that a substantial 35.3% of instances occurred in the 2015–2019 timeframe. It must also be underscored that their distribution across the 50 academic journals was not uniform, as shown in the appendix. It is apparent that five journals (totalling 1888 articles) featured no uncovered speech act titles. In contrast, a further five; Language in Society (57), Language and Education (42), TESOL Quarterly (35), Applied Linguistics (32), and the Journal of English for Academic Purposes (30) accounted for 30.6% of all speech act titles.

Structural Analysis of Speech Act Titles

When analysed separately, quotations were found to contain an average of 11.6 words (S.D. = 3.02). While there were some high outliers, including one instance of 26 words, 86.7% of quotations featured 10 words or fewer. The quotations themselves contributed 52.6% of a title’s length on average. A range of distinct structural trends were evinced in authors’ usage of directly reported speech in linguistics research article titles, outlined in Table 3 . In an overwhelming 96.3% of instances, the quotation constituted one part of a compound structure with mostly two segments, marked by a colon, question mark, exclamation mark, or other non-alphanumeric character. Among this pattern, 94.5% of speech acts occurred in the first segment, performing the cataphoric referential role of creating an information deficit which is addressed in the second segment by the topic of the research (Pułaczewska 2010 ). Rarely did direct speech perform the anaphoric role as the second component (5.5%) or wholly constitute the title in the form of a full sentence (3.8%).

In terms of quotation syntactic patterning, there was a clear preference for clausal utterances in the selected quotations utilised by authors (80.5%) since clausal patterns, where the subject is speaking or writing from a personal perspective, coheres with the aim of imbuing a title with greater individuality and humanity. Quotations conveyed as a declarative utterance constituted 61.9% of all clausal constructions, followed by interrogative patterns (26.8%). Not surprisingly, the least common clausal pattern was the imperative/exclamative (11.3%), chosen for its snappy, attention-grabbing impact on the reader. In contrast, phrasal patterns constituted only 13.8% of speech act titles, often contributing ambiguity to their interpretation (e.g., 'The voices, the voices': Creativity in online conversation ), perhaps in the hope of inspiring readers to retrieve the article to solve the mystery. 5.8% of speech acts were not written in English (even though the other title segment was) and were thus not coded for their syntactic pattern.

As shown in Table 3 , 62.7% of compound speech act titles featured contiguity between the quotation in one segment and the research topic in the other. Writers utilising contiguous compound titles tended to explicitly state the genre of the speech act, thereby employing the quotation to exemplify the discourse being investigated ( 'Interesting post, but I disagree': Social presence and antisocial behaviour in academic weblogs ). More efficient contiguous structures involved the author providing structural (syntactic, lexical, phonological), semantic (politeness, function), and other relevant clues (speaker, location, text-type) (Pułaczewska 2010 ), particularly in the topic segment (e.g., 'Smuggling the vernacular into the classroom': Conflicts and tensions in classroom codeswitching in township/rural schools in South Africa ). Less efficient contiguous titles require the reader to presume that the speech act originated from a spoken encounter of some kind ( Tower, am I cleared to land?: Problematic communication in aviation discourse ). Speech acts in non-contiguous titles (33.4%) do not serve to exemplify a spoken or written genre. Instead, the relationship between the two components is not syntactically explicit: “The Future Is Not What It Used To Be”: Gender, History, and Communication Studies . The resulting ambiguity may constitute a deliberate ploy to arouse the reader’s curiosity. Concerning marking quotations with non-alphanumeric characters, most speech acts were contained within either double (36.4%) or single quotation marks (27.3%). A notable 36.3% of speech act titles featured no punctuation symbols, although it cannot be ruled out some of these may have been formatted using italics, signposting that was lost once the titles had been listed in SCOPUS.

Effects of Speech Act Titles on Citations

Table 4 illustrates the outcomes of the regression models. Model a outlines the effects of direct speech quotations (along with the control variables), model b the effect of quotation length on the AWCR of speech act titles, and models c-f the impact of the various dummy variables within the four categorical variables ( title syntactic structure , quotation syntactic pattern , contiguity , and non-alphanumeric marking ) and the controls. Notably, study titles that included or encompassed quoted speech were found to be cited significantly less frequently than those that featured alternative styles or patterns (β = -0.02, p  < 0.001). Since 90.9% of titles featuring quotations incorporated them as the first segment of a compound structure, it is not surprising that this syntactic structure was also a statistically significant negative determinant of AWCRs (β = -0.02, p  < 0.001), shown in model c. On the other hand, according to model b, there appeared to be no significant effect on the citations of the 640 articles alone that featured speech acts depending on the length of quotation in words (β = 0.01, p  = 0.91).

Among the three clausal patterns, quotations presented as declarative utterances were found to be statistically significant negative determinants of age-weighted citation rates (β = −0.01, p  = 0.01). In contrast, those phrased as interrogatives and imperatives/exclamatives did not exert as notable a negative influence on citations, with beta values lower than −0.01 that were statistically insignificant. Additionally, model e demonstrates that it did not make a difference whether compound titles featuring a speech act quotation established a contiguous or non-contiguous information gap across the segments. Both titular characteristics exerted a significant negative effect on age-weighted citations (β =  −0.01, p  = 0.01 and β = −0.01, p  = 0.02 respectively). Finally, a notable finding stemmed from whether a quotation was marked by non-alphanumeric characters or not. Those quotations that were unmarked were found to be significantly associated with lower AWCRs (β = -0.01, p  = 0.002).

Directly reported speech in a research article title is a not a new phenomenon in linguistics, with four instances among the highest-ranking linguistics journals (circa-2019) in the earliest year of the dataset, 1980. Nevertheless, the present study identified a clear trend towards increasing usage across the six five-year segments. The first two decades of the timeframe constituted a mere 18.6% of speech act titles. Only after 2000 are notable increases present, particularly the 17.4% rise in prevalence from 2000 to 2014. Interestingly, the most recent time period 2015–2019 accounts for a substantial 35.3% of all incidences of speech act titles. This suggests that titles featuring quoted speech are growing in acceptance in linguistics, paralleling the trend of diversification in the structuring of research article titles exhibited over recent decades (Li and Xu 2019 ; Sahragard and Meihami 2016 ; Xiang and Li 2019 ). Alternatively, it demonstrates authors’ growing concerns with making their articles stand out in an increasingly crowded field (Fox and Burns 2015 ; Kueffer and Larson 2014 ; Letchford et al. 2015 ), indicated by the marked rises in quantities of linguistics articles across the time period in Table 2 . It also reflects the increasing prevalence and credibility of qualitative research in the discipline (Duff 2008 ; Richards 2006 ), which by its nature utilises the exact words of language users as sources of evidence or constitutes the subject of the inquiry itself.

It must be underscored that the prevalence of speech act titles in high-ranking linguistics journals is still very low, averaging just 1.8% of the whole dataset. Interestingly, this figure corresponds to the 1.8% prevalence uncovered in Pułaczewska's ( 2010 ) qualitative analysis of speech act titles sourced from The Linguist List , even though the author’s sample of titles was significantly smaller (2861) and limited to the selected sub-discipline of pragmatics. In the present study, five journals were discovered to have published no articles featuring a speech act title between 1980 and 2019, which was perhaps an outcome of the peer review process or owing to journal/editorial standards (Gesuato 2008 ; Sahragard and Meihami 2016 ). While the frequency of speech act titles increased to 2.3% in 2015–2019, it is apparent they still constitute a rare writing convention in linguistics research. This may be because, like other unorthodox stylistic cues, many scholars are cautious to adopt syntactic strategies that might go against published guidance that emphasises parsimony and lack of emotion (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ), or out of fear such practices could undermine an article’s credibility.

Certain structural patterns emerged in authors’ usage of directly reported speech in linguistics research article titles. They were found to be overwhelmingly composite of compound titles (96.3%), mostly being situated in the first segment (90.9%), e.g., “She Needs to Be Shy!”: Gender, Culture, and Nonparticipation Among Saudi Arabian Female Students . By utilising a quotation in this way, the author is attempting to engage the reader interpersonally (Nagano 2007 ), inviting them to employ their subject matter expertise and interest in the issue to follow the writer’s response to the information gap created (Pułaczewska 2010 ). In contiguous titles (62.7%), this information gap constitutes the reader not knowing who said these words, in what context, and/or why. A non-contiguous title (33.4%) adds further complexity to interpreting the speech act since its relationship to the research topic is less clear. These patterns constitute a stylistic cue that goes beyond the mere description of an article’s content (Keating et al. 2019 ). Instead, the emphasis on participants’ thoughts, feelings, or experiences through frequent clausal (80.5%) and declarative (49.8%) speech acts constitutes an effort to inject a sense of authenticity and humanity into how the study is presented to the reader. Such personalised cues tend not to be present in nominal titles that feature extensive pre- or post-modification of head nouns. Less commonly, clausal constructions are phrased interrogatively (21.6%), enticing the reader to retrieve the article to understand how the participants’ query was responded to, or how the reader her/himself would respond. Finally, the small number of exclamative speech acts (9.1%) evince a predilection towards deliberate attention-grabbing (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ; Keating et al. 2019 ) or frivolity (Fox and Burns 2015 ).

The present study found that the usage of a quotation in a linguistics research article title in a high-ranking journal, particularly when combined with the research topic in a compound construction, exerted a significant negative effect on the paper’s age-weighted citation rate. As such, this paper joins a growing list of studies that conclude titles which incorporate rhetorical devices that do more than parsimoniously describe the study face a possibly attenuated scholarly impact (Keating et al. 2019 ; Lockwood 2016 ; Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ). This may be because of how readers of research article titles perceive such stylistic cues. As a creative and whimsical rhetorical feature, quoted speech may harm the credibility of the author (Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ), being perceived as a gimmick to engage the reader (Ball 2009 ) or as indicative of low paper quality (Keating et al. 2019 ; Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ). Alternatively, since such titles nearly always feature a non-alphanumeric character (i.e., inverted commas to mark the quotation and/or a colon, full-stop or question mark to compound the structure), they create complexity for readers to understand the nature of the study (Nair and Gibbert 2016 ; Paiva et al. 2012 ). Another explanation is that an article headlined by a research participant’s authentic language in use might be interpreted as ‘soft’ (Richards 2006 ), because it signals that the researcher is addressing the topic from the interpretive tradition. It was found speech act titles featuring the quotation phrased as a question performed slightly better. This may be because, as with interrogative patterns in research article titles more generally, the stated question piques the interest of the reader (Gnewuch and Wohlrabe 2017 ), encouraging them to retrieve the article to find out the researcher’s response to the line of inquiry (Hyland 2002 ).

There are also reasons unique to research article titles featuring direct speech that may explain the attenuated scholarly impact. For speech act titles where the quotation is contained in the initial segment, the information gap created places cognitive demands on readers to decode the potentially ambiguous relationship between the quotation and the topic (Pułaczewska 2010 ). With an overflow of research information and time pressures to complete a project (Buter and van Raan 2011 ; Jacques and Sebire 2010 ; Letchford et al. 2015 ; Sahragard and Meihami 2016 ), many readers may have limited tolerance for literary creativity or ambiguity (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ) when browsing dozens of article titles. Additionally, with 52.6% of a speech act title comprising the quotation itself, such a pattern inevitably omits important facets of the research expected by some readers, such as the findings, methodology, scope of the study, and source of the data. It may also compromise the ability of the author to include keywords (Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ). These omissions may depress scholarly impact through harming the visibility and retrievability of such articles in popular research article indices (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ). Alternatively, the impact could be perceptual, with the absence of keywords or expected characteristics of the study dissuading readers, who seek to interpret the nature and relevance of the study, from persevering with the article.

It may be speculated that the scholarly impact of research articles featuring direct speech in their titles may have suffered due to such titles’ extended lengths, a finding uncovered in prior titlelogical studies in non-linguistics disciplines (Gnewuch and Wohlrabe 2017 ; Jamali and Nikzad 2011 ; Letchford et al. 2015 ; Paiva et al. 2012 ; Subotic and Mukherjee 2014 ). This analysis revealed that the average length of titles featuring speech acts was 11.6 words, of which, the mean length of quotations was 6.1 words. This is nearly double the length of linguistics titles uncovered in previous studies (Haggan 2004 ; Soler 2007 ), although the corpus of titles in the present study was more comprehensive. Interestingly, the average length of non-speech act titles in the present study’s dataset was only slightly shorter, at 11.2 words (a figure that coheres with Xie's ( 2020 ) study). This suggests the attenuation of scholarly impact has arisen not from such titles being considered ‘too long’ but perhaps for perceptual or retrievability reasons. Additionally, it was found that the length of the quotation, measured in words, exerted no significant effect on AWCRs. This might be because the detrimental complexity of longer quotations is cancelled out by the harmful vagueness of shorter phrasal speech acts.

It was further uncovered that research article titles that did not mark direct speech with either single or double quotation marks suffered noticeably in terms of scholarly impact. This is not an unexpected finding since ambiguity concerning whether titular text indeed comprises directly reported speech may confuse the reader. Additionally, the lack of non-alphanumeric marking risks the reader possibly conflating researcher and participant voices, especially if scanning through a long list of titles. However, this finding must be interpreted cautiously. One reason is the choice of titular formatting, i.e., whether and which symbols to employ may not belong to the author, instead being addressed during the peer review process or falling under editorial standards (Subotic and Mukherjee 2014 ). It must also be acknowledged that the journal may have opted to signal a section of title text as directly reported speech through italicisation, textual formatting that is lost when titles are indexed in SCOPUS.

Conclusions

The present study is bound by a number of limitations. First, the findings reflect the impact of speech act titles in high-ranking linguistics journals only, where there is likely to be less tolerance for stylistic cues that may be interpreted as frivolous or gimmicky (Aleixandre-Benavent et al. 2014 ; Keating et al. 2019 ). It is plausible that, had research article titles from lower-ranking journals been investigated, the results would have differed. Additionally, publication date is a probable mediating factor on citation counts (Guo et al. 2018 ). It is not inconceivable that, as a result of the growing use (and acceptance) of speech act titles, if the study is replicated in a decade, the results may be quite different. Methodologically, high multicollinearity across several dummy variables (notably, presence of a direct speech quotation , compound first segment title structure , clausal declarative quotation syntactic pattern , and contiguous relationship) meant that it was not possible to combine them into an integrated model to examine their collective impact on the age-weighted citation rate. Finally, citations themselves are crude measures of an article’s impact (Zhu et al. 2015 ), and do not provide insights into a paper’s retrieval rate or the reader’s perceptions of the study’s value. Thus, the operationalisation of scholarly impact in the present study should be interpreted cautiously.

Descriptive analysis revealed that speech act titles are not a common occurrence across linguistics research publications, present in just 1.8% of articles from Clarivate Analytics’ 50 highest-ranked linguistics journals between 1980 and 2019. In the last 20 years, instances of speech act titles have increased significantly, with the time period 2015–19 constituting 35.3% of all such titles since 1980. However, the regression analysis indicates that it may not be in the best interests of authors to employ speech act quotations in a paper’s title. Their presence particularly in a compound structure with a fronted quotation was a strongly significant ( p  = 0.001) negative predictor of age-weighted citation rates. It is possible this is because speech act titles harm the retrievability of the respective article, through compromising the ability of the author to include keywords or characteristics of the study that are often present (scope of study, source of data, methodology). The issue may also be perceptual. The taxing information gap (Pułaczewska 2010 ) may confuse or irritate the reader. Alternatively, speech act titles may be perceived as indicative of lower quality or ‘soft’ research (Keating et al. 2019 ; Sagi and Yechiam 2008 ), or as frivolity or a gimmick (Ball 2009 ; Fox and Burns 2015 ). Other dummy variables that featured a significant negative effect on AWCRs were quotations conveyed as a declarative utterance, both contiguous and non-contiguous patterns, and the absence of non-alphanumeric characters to visibly mark the text as a quotation. Future studies are recommended to test for replication of the findings in other social science disciplines that feature speech act titles. Additionally, explorations of the social impact of speech act titles may help reveal why readers appear negatively disposed towards citing such articles.

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Breakdown of research article titles and speech act titles by journal.

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Pearson, W.S. Quoted speech in linguistics research article titles: patterns of use and effects on citations. Scientometrics 126 , 3421–3442 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03827-5

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Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper

• Choosing a Title
• Purpose of Guide
• Design Flaws to Avoid
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The title summarizes the main idea or ideas of your study. A good title contains the fewest possible words needed to adequately describe the content and/or purpose of your research paper.

Importance of Choosing a Good Title

The title is the part of a paper that is read the most, and it is usually read first . It is, therefore, the most important element that defines the research study. With this in mind, avoid the following when creating a title:

• If the title is too long, this usually indicates there are too many unnecessary words. Avoid language, such as, "A Study to Investigate the...," or "An Examination of the...." These phrases are obvious and generally superfluous unless they are necessary to covey the scope, intent, or type of a study.
• On the other hand, a title which is too short often uses words which are too broad and, thus, does not tell the reader what is being studied. For example, a paper with the title, "African Politics" is so non-specific the title could be the title of a book and so ambiguous that it could refer to anything associated with politics in Africa. A good title should provide information about the focus and/or scope of your research study.
• In academic writing, catchy phrases or non-specific language may be used, but only if it's within the context of the study [e.g., "Fair and Impartial Jury--Catch as Catch Can"]. However, in most cases, you should avoid including words or phrases that do not help the reader understand the purpose of your paper.
• Academic writing is a serious and deliberate endeavor. Avoid using humorous or clever journalistic styles of phrasing when creating the title to your paper. Journalistic headlines often use emotional adjectives [e.g., incredible, amazing, effortless] to highlight a problem experienced by the reader or use "trigger words" or interrogative words like how, what, when, or why to persuade people to read the article or click on a link. These approaches are viewed as counter-productive in academic writing. A reader does not need clever or humorous titles to catch their attention because the act of reading research is assumed to be deliberate based on a desire to learn and improve understanding of the problem. In addition, a humorous title can merely detract from the seriousness and authority of your research. 
• Unlike everywhere else in a college-level social sciences research paper [except when using direct quotes in the text], titles do not have to adhere to rigid grammatical or stylistic standards. For example, it could be appropriate to begin a title with a coordinating conjunction [i.e., and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet] if it makes sense to do so and does not detract from the purpose of the study [e.g., "Yet Another Look at Mutual Fund Tournaments"] or beginning the title with an inflected form of a verb such as those ending in -ing [e.g., "Assessing the Political Landscape: Structure, Cognition, and Power in Organizations"].

Appiah, Kingsley Richard et al. “Structural Organisation of Research Article Titles: A Comparative Study of Titles of Business, Gynaecology and Law.” Advances in Language and Literary Studies 10 (2019); Hartley James. “To Attract or to Inform: What are Titles for?” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 35 (2005): 203-213; Jaakkola, Maarit. “Journalistic Writing and Style.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication . Jon F. Nussbaum, editor. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018): https://oxfordre.com/communication.

Structure and Writing Style

The following parameters can be used to help you formulate a suitable research paper title:

• The purpose of the research
• The scope of the research
• The narrative tone of the paper [typically defined by the type of the research]
• The methods used to study the problem

The initial aim of a title is to capture the reader’s attention and to highlight the research problem under investigation.

Create a Working Title Typically, the final title you submit to your professor is created after the research is complete so that the title accurately captures what has been done . The working title should be developed early in the research process because it can help anchor the focus of the study in much the same way the research problem does. Referring back to the working title can help you reorient yourself back to the main purpose of the study if you find yourself drifting off on a tangent while writing. The Final Title Effective titles in research papers have several characteristics that reflect general principles of academic writing.

• Indicate accurately the subject and scope of the study,
• Rarely use abbreviations or acronyms unless they are commonly known,
• Use words that create a positive impression and stimulate reader interest,
• Use current nomenclature from the field of study,
• Identify key variables, both dependent and independent,
• Reveal how the paper will be organized,
• Suggest a relationship between variables which supports the major hypothesis,
• Is limited to 5 to 15 substantive words,
• Does not include redundant phrasing, such as, "A Study of," "An Analysis of" or similar constructions,
• Takes the form of a question or declarative statement,
• If you use a quote as part of the title, the source of the quote is cited [usually using an asterisk and footnote],
• Use correct grammar and capitalization with all first words and last words capitalized, including the first word of a subtitle. All nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that appear between the first and last words of the title are also capitalized, and
• Rarely uses an exclamation mark at the end of the title.

The Subtitle Subtitles are frequently used in social sciences research papers because it helps the reader understand the scope of the study in relation to how it was designed to address the research problem. Think about what type of subtitle listed below reflects the overall approach to your study and whether you believe a subtitle is needed to emphasize the investigative parameters of your research.

1.  Explains or provides additional context , e.g., "Linguistic Ethnography and the Study of Welfare Institutions as a Flow of Social Practices: The Case of Residential Child Care Institutions as Paradoxical Institutions." [Palomares, Manuel and David Poveda.  Text & Talk: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies 30 (January 2010): 193-212]

2.  Adds substance to a literary, provocative, or imaginative title or quote , e.g., "Listen to What I Say, Not How I Vote": Congressional Support for the President in Washington and at Home." [Grose, Christian R. and Keesha M. Middlemass. Social Science Quarterly 91 (March 2010): 143-167]

3.  Qualifies the geographic scope of the research , e.g., "The Geopolitics of the Eastern Border of the European Union: The Case of Romania-Moldova-Ukraine." [Marcu, Silvia. Geopolitics 14 (August 2009): 409-432]

4.  Qualifies the temporal scope of the research , e.g., "A Comparison of the Progressive Era and the Depression Years: Societal Influences on Predictions of the Future of the Library, 1895-1940." [Grossman, Hal B. Libraries & the Cultural Record 46 (2011): 102-128]

5.  Focuses on investigating the ideas, theories, or work of a particular individual , e.g., "A Deliberative Conception of Politics: How Francesco Saverio Merlino Related Anarchy and Democracy." [La Torre, Massimo. Sociologia del Diritto 28 (January 2001): 75 - 98]

6.  Identifies the methodology used , e.g. "Student Activism of the 1960s Revisited: A Multivariate Analysis Research Note." [Aron, William S. Social Forces 52 (March 1974): 408-414]

7.  Defines the overarching technique for analyzing the research problem , e.g., "Explaining Territorial Change in Federal Democracies: A Comparative Historical Institutionalist Approach." [ Tillin, Louise. Political Studies 63 (August 2015): 626-641.

With these examples in mind, think about what type of subtitle reflects the overall approach to your study. This will help the reader understand the scope of the study in relation to how it was designed to address the research problem.

Anstey, A. “Writing Style: What's in a Title?” British Journal of Dermatology 170 (May 2014): 1003-1004; Balch, Tucker. How to Compose a Title for Your Research Paper. Augmented Trader blog. School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech University; Bavdekar, Sandeep B. “Formulating the Right Title for a Research Article.” Journal of Association of Physicians of India 64 (February 2016); Choosing the Proper Research Paper Titles. AplusReports.com, 2007-2012; Eva, Kevin W. “Titles, Abstracts, and Authors.” In How to Write a Paper . George M. Hall, editor. 5th edition. (Oxford: John Wiley and Sons, 2013), pp. 33-41; Hartley James. “To Attract or to Inform: What are Titles for?” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 35 (2005): 203-213; General Format. The Writing Lab and The OWL. Purdue University; Kerkut G.A. “Choosing a Title for a Paper.” Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology 74 (1983): 1; “Tempting Titles.” In Stylish Academic Writing . Helen Sword, editor. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 63-75; Nundy, Samiran, et al. “How to Choose a Title?” In How to Practice Academic Medicine and Publish from Developing Countries? A Practical Guide . Edited by Samiran Nundy, Atul Kakar, and Zulfiqar A. Bhutta. (Springer Singapore, 2022), pp. 185-192.

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How to write a good research paper title

“Unread science is lost science .”

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“Unread science is lost science.”

28 July 2020

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With the influx of publications brought on by the pandemic, it’s become more challenging than ever for researchers to attract attention to their work.

Understanding which elements of a title will attract readers – or turn them away – has been proven to increase a paper’s citations and Altmetric score .

“In the era of information overload, most students and researchers do not have time to browse the entire text of a paper,” says Patrick Pu , a librarian at the National University of Singapore.

“The title of a paper, together with its abstract, become very important to capture and sustain the attention of readers.”

1. A good title avoids technical language

Since the primary audience of a paper is likely to be researchers working in the same field, using technical language in the title seems to make sense.

But this alienates the wider lay audience, which can bring valuable attention to your work . It can also alienate inexperienced researchers, or those who have recently entered the field.

“A good title does not use unnecessary jargon,” says Elisa De Ranieri , editor-in-chief at the Nature Communications journal (published by Springer Nature, which also publishes Nature Index.) “It communicates the main results in the study in a way that is clear and accessible, ideally to non-specialists or researchers new to the field.”

How-to: When crafting a title, says De Ranieri, write down the main result of the manuscript in a short paragraph. Shorten the text to make it more concise, while still remaining descriptive. Repeat this process until you have a title of fewer than 15 words.

2. A good title is easily searchable

Most readers today are accessing e-journals, which are indexed in scholarly databases such as Scopus and Google Scholar.

“Although these databases usually index the full text of papers, retrieval weightage for ‘Title’ is usually higher than other fields, such as ‘Results’,” Pu explains.

At the National University of Singapore, Pu and his colleagues run information literacy programmes for editors and authors. They give advice for publishing best practice, such as how to identify the most commonly used keywords in literature searches in a given field.

“A professor once told us how he discovered that industry experts were using a different term or keyword to describe his research area,” says Pu.

“He had written a seminal paper that did not include this ‘industry keyword’. He believes his paper, which was highly cited by academics, would have a higher citation count if he had included this keyword in the title. As librarians, we try to highlight this example to our students so that they will consider all possible keywords to use in their searches and paper titles.”

How-to: Authors should speak to an academic librarian at their institution to gain an understanding of keyword and search trends in their field of research. This should inform how the paper title is written.

3. A good title is substantiated by data

Authors should be cautious to not make any claims in the title that can’t be backed up by evidence.

“For instance, if you make a discovery with potential therapeutic relevance, the title should specify whether it was tested or studied in animals or humans/human samples,” says Irene Jarchum , senior editor at the journal Nature Biotechnology (also published by Springer Nature, which publishes the Nature Index.)

Jarchum adds that titles can be contentious because different authors have different views on the use of specific words, such as acronyms, or more fundamentally, what the main message of the title should be.

Some authors may over-interpret the significance of their preliminary findings, and want to reflect this in the title.

How-to: If you know your paper will be contentious within the scientific community, have the data ready to defend your decisions .

4. A good title sparks curiosity

A one-liner that sparks a reader’s interest can be very effective.

“A title has to pique the interest of the person searching for literature in a split-second – enough that they click on the title to read the abstract. Unread science is lost science,” says Christine Mayer , editor-in-chief of the journal Advanced Therapeutics .

Paper titles such as, "White and wonderful? Microplastics prevail in snow from the Alps to the Arctic" ( 2019 Science ), and “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking” ( 2019 Science Advances ) are good examples of this principle. Both papers have high Altmetric Attention scores, indicating that they have been widely read and discussed online.

How-to: Take note of the characteristics of paper titles that spark your own interest. Keep a record of these and apply the same principles to your own paper titles.

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What To Know About Payday and Car Title Loans

What To Know About Payday Loans

What to know about car title loans, possible alternatives to payday and car title loans, what information to look for when applying for a payday or car title loan, special protections for military servicemembers, report fraud or deception.

Payday loans are small, short-term loans. They’re usually for $500 or less, and typically have to be repaid within two to four weeks. Also called cash advance loans, they are legal in many states.

To get a payday loan, you give the lender a personal check for the amount you want to borrow, plus the lender’s fees. Or, you authorize the lender to electronically debit the loan amount, plus fees, from your bank, credit union, or prepaid card account. If you don’t repay the loan on time, the lender can cash the check or electronically withdraw money from your account.

Payday loans are expensive. Lenders usually charge from $10 to $30 for every $100 borrowed. On a typical two-week payday loan, a fee of $15 per $100 translates to an annual percentage rate (APR) of 391%. The APR tells you how much it costs you to borrow money for one year. By comparison, in the first quarter of 2023, the average APR for credit cards was just under 21%.

Here’s how a typical payday loan works: You want to borrow $500. The lender offers you a two-week loan. The fee is $15 for every $100 you borrow. So your fee will be $75. ($15 x 5 = $75). You give the lender a check for $575, or you authorize the lender to electronically debit your bank account. The lender gives you $500 in cash. Two weeks later, you owe the lender $575. The lender will either debit your bank account, cash your check, or take cash or another form of payment from you, depending on how you agreed to repay the loan. The bottom line: You paid $75 to borrow $500 for two weeks.

Costs increase with rollovers. If you can’t repay the loan when it’s due, many lenders will let you extend the due date for another two or four weeks — but you have to pay the fee that's due, plus a new fee to extend the due date. It's called a “rollover.” Each time you roll over the loan, the lender will charge you a new fee and you'll still owe the entire original loan amount. With rollovers, the cost of the loan goes up very quickly.

Here’s how a typical rollover works: Using the example above, on the original due date you don’t repay the $500 loan. Instead, you pay only the $75 fee and roll over the $500 loan for another two weeks. The rollover will cost you another $75 fee. Two weeks after rolling over the loan, you still owe the lender $500 for the loan, plus the new $75 fee. The bottom line: The cost of the original $500 loan has gone from $75 to $150 due to the rollover.

If you roll over the loan several times, you may pay hundreds of dollars in fees and still owe the original amount you borrowed.

Car title loans, often just called title loans, also are short-term loans. They typically last 15 or 30 days. The loans use your car, truck, motorcycle, or other vehicle as collateral. They’re usually for amounts ranging from 25% to 50% of the vehicle’s value.

To get a car title loan, you must give the lender the title to your vehicle. Usually, you need to own the vehicle free and clear, but some lenders will take your title if you’ve paid off most of your vehicle loan. The lender will want to see the vehicle, a photo ID, and proof of insurance. Many lenders also want a duplicate set of keys for the vehicle.

If you get the title loan, you won’t get your vehicle title back until you repay the amount you borrowed, plus the lender’s finance charge and any other fees.

Car title loans are expensive. Title loans often have monthly finance fees as high as 25%, which translates to an APR of about 300%. Title lenders often add other charges to the loan amount, like processing, document, and loan origination fees. You also may have to buy add-ons, like a roadside service plan. If you have to pay added fees and buy add-ons, the cost of your loan will be higher.

Here’s how a typical car title loan works: You want to borrow $1,000 for 30 days. The finance fee is 25%. That means that you have to pay $250 to borrow $1,000. You give the lender the title to your car, and the lender gives you $1,000 in cash. When it’s time to repay the lender in 30 days, you must pay $1,250, plus any other fees the lender charges.

Costs increase with rollovers. If you can’t repay a title loan when it’s due, the lender may let you roll it over into a new loan. But rolling over the loan will add more interest and fees to the amount you owe.

Here’s how a typical title loan rollover works: Using the example above, on the original due date you don’t pay but instead roll over the 30-day, $1,000 loan for another 30 days. The rollover will add another $250 in finance fees, plus any other fees, to the amount you owe. That $250 is added to the $1,250 you already owe, so now you owe $1,500, plus any other fees that the lender may charge for the rollover. The rollover brings your cost of borrowing $1,000 for 60 days to at least $500.

You could lose your vehicle. If you can’t repay the money you owe, the lender may repossess your vehicle , even if you’ve been making partial payments. When you get the loan, some lenders insist on installing Global Positioning System (GPS) and starter interrupt devices so that they can locate the vehicle and disable its ignition system remotely, making repossession easier.

Once the lender repossesses your vehicle, they can sell it. In some states, lenders can keep all the money they get from selling the vehicle, even if they get more than you owe.

Here are some less expensive and less risky options to payday and car title loans:

• Ask your creditors for more time  to repay them. They may be willing to work with you. If they offer an extension on your bills, find out if they’ll charge you for that service — through a late charge, an additional finance charge, or a higher interest rate.
• Try to get a loan from a credit union. Credit unions typically offer lower interest rates than banks or other lenders, and some federal credit unions offer “payday alternative loans,” or “PAL loans,” for small loans. PAL loans are much less expensive than payday or car title loans. Some state-chartered credit unions offer loans similar to PAL loans.
• Visit a community bank. Local banks can offer smaller loans with easier repayment terms than many large regional and national banks. Talk with a small bank in your area to find out if you could qualify for a loan.
• Check with local branches of large banks in your area.  Some large U.S. banks now offer small loans or lines of credit to customers with low or no credit scores. The loans can be for up to $1,000, depending on the bank, and borrowers can access the money quickly. Like the PAL loans, these loans are much safer and more affordable than payday and car title loans and can save you hundreds of dollars.
• Use your tax refund.  If you think you might have a tax refund coming, file as soon as you can. The IRS says it usually issues refunds in 21 days or less if you file electronically. Ask the IRS to direct deposit your refund into your bank account.
• Get help managing debt.  A credit counselor may be able to help you manage your debt . Non-profit groups in every state offer credit guidance to people for no or low cost. Check with your employer, credit union, or housing authority for no- or low-cost credit counseling programs , too.
• Ask family and friends for help. It can be hard to borrow money from family or friends, but it can be worth it to avoid taking out or rolling over a payday or title loan. And even if friends and family can't loan you the whole amount, every dollar they can lend is a dollar you don't have to pay high interest rates on.
• Contact local charities and churches. Charities, churches, and other centers of worship often offer financial and other help at no cost to community members who are hitting a rough spot. It’s what they do, and they encourage people to ask for help.

Federal law treats payday and title loans like other types of credit: lenders must tell you the cost of the loan in writing before you sign the loan agreement. They must tell you the finance charge, which is a dollar amount, and the APR, which is a percentage. The APR is based on how much money you borrow, the monthly finance charge, the fees you’ll have to pay (like processing fees, document fees, and other charges), and how long you borrow the money. Use the APR to compare the cost of borrowing money from different lenders. It’s the clearest way to see how expensive a loan is.

Be sure to read the loan agreement carefully to see if there are other costs or fees. These can include late or returned check fees. There also may be fees to roll over the loan.

Also, check with your state attorney general or state regulator about payday and title lending laws in your state. A number of states protect people from high-cost payday lending with small-loan rate caps or other measures. Many states also require lenders to be licensed if they operate in the state.

If you’re in the military, the Military Lending Act protects you and your dependents. The law limits the APR on many types of credit, including payday loans, car title loans, personal loans, and credit cards, to 36%. The law also tells lenders to give you information about your rights and the cost of the loan.

The military also offers financial help and help managing your money. If you’re facing financial trouble, talk with a Personal Financial Manager (PFM) about your options. Do you need more time to pay your bills or a possible advance on your paycheck? Do you want to talk with a certified credit counselor about managing your money? Do you want some help from a military relief society? Call DoD’s  Military OneSource help line at 1-800-342-9647 to discuss alternatives. Visit MilitaryConsumer.gov to learn more.

If you think a payday or car title lender has been dishonest, contact your state attorney general or state consumer protection office . Tell the FTC too, at ReportFraud.ftc.gov . The FTC doesn’t resolve individual reports, but your report helps law enforcement detect patterns of wrongdoing and may lead to an investigation.

How the YouTube Algorithm Works in 2024

Looking to increase your YouTube video views? Step one: find out what’s new with the YouTube algorithm and how it ranks your content.

Table of Contents

If you believe in free will, we have terrible news — well, at least when it comes to YouTube. Because YouTube’s algorithm for recommendations drives 70% of what people watch on the platform .

That is some seriously staggering influence!

So it’s no surprise that marketers, influencers, and creators are obsessed with unlocking the secret of the Youtube algorithm. How does it work? What makes it tick? And, most importantly, how can we take advantage of this mysterious formula?

Well, wonder no more, because in this blog post, we’ll cover everything about the YouTube algorithm that you’ve been dying to know.

Bonus: Download the free 30-day plan to grow your YouTube following fast , a daily workbook of challenges that will help you kickstart your Youtube channel growth and track your success. Get real results after one month.

A brief history of the YouTube algorithm

What is the YouTube algorithm? To answer that question, let’s do a quick overview of how YouTube’s Algorithm has changed over the years. And how it works today.

2005-2011: Optimizing for clicks & views

According to founder Jawed Karim (a.k.a. the star of Me at the Zoo ), YouTube was created in 2005 in order to crowdsource the video of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s notorious Superbowl performance . So it makes sense that YouTube’s algorithm started off by recommending videos that attracted the most views or clicks.

Of course, this led to an increase in misleading titles and thumbnails (a.k.a. clickbait). User experience plummeted as videos left people feeling tricked, unsatisfied, or plain old annoyed.

2012: Optimizing for watch time

In 2012, YouTube adjusted its recommendation system to support time spent watching each video. It also included time spent on the platform overall. When people find videos valuable and interesting, they watch them for longer. Or, so the theory goes.

This shift to reward watch time was a game changer. According to Mark Bergan , author of Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, “[Watch time] had an immediate impact. Early YouTubers were basically making TikTok videos… but watch time created gaming, beauty vlogging, alt-right podcasts… all these verticals we now associate with YouTube.”

Accounts that were big performers previously (like videos from eHow, or MysteryGuitarMan) dropped off almost immediately.

YouTube’s algorithm change led some creators to try to make their videos shorter in order to make it more likely viewers would watch to completion. Others made their videos longer in order to increase watch time overall. YouTube didn’t comment on either of these tactics and maintained the party line: make videos your audience wants to watch, and the algorithm will reward you.

That said, as anyone who has ever spent any time on the internet knows, time spent is not necessarily equivalent to quality time spent. Soon, YouTube changed tack again.

2015-2016: Optimizing for satisfaction

In 2015, YouTube began measuring viewer satisfaction directly with user surveys. It also prioritized direct response metrics like Shares, Likes, and Dislikes (and, of course, the especially brutal “not interested” button).

In 2016, YouTube released a whitepaper describing some of the inner workings of its AI: Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations.

In short, the algorithm had gotten way more personal. The goal was to find the video each particular viewer wants to watch, not just the video that lots of other people have perhaps watched in the past.

As a result, in 2018, YouTube’s Chief product officer mentioned on a panel that 70% of watch time on YouTube is spent watching videos the algorithm recommends.

Create. Schedule. Publish. Engage. Measure. Win.

2016-present: Dangerous content, demonetization, and brand safety

Over the years, YouTube’s size and popularity have resulted in an increasing number of content moderation issues. And what the algorithm recommends has become a concerning topic not just for creators and advertisers but for journalists and the government as well.

YouTube has said it is serious about its responsibility to support a diverse range of opinions while reducing the spread of harmful misinformation. Algorithm changes enacted in early 2019, for example, have reduced consumption of borderline content by 70% . (YouTube defines borderline content as content that doesn’t quite violate community guidelines but is harmful or misleading. Violative content, on the other hand, is immediately removed .)

This issue affects creators, who fear accidentally violating ever-changing community guidelines. Or being punished with strikes, demonetization, or worse.

(Former CEO Susan Wojcicki said one of YouTube’s priorities in 2021 was increasing transparency for community guidelines for creators).

It also affects brands and advertisers, who don’t want their name and logo running alongside white supremacists.

Meanwhile, American politicians are increasingly concerned with the societal role of social media algorithms. YouTube (and other platforms) have been summoned to account for their algorithms at Senate hearings. And in early 2021 Democrats introduced a ”Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act.”

In recent years, researchers have found the new YouTube algorithm has made strides to reduce the amount of harmful content its algorithm serves up. Though, the recent 2024 Finnish election found evidence of YouTube promoting alt-right content — despite purported changes to the algorithm.

It seems we’re not out of the harmful-YouTube-content woods, just yet.

How does the YouTube algorithm work in 2024?

Next, let’s talk about what we know about how the YouTube algorithm works.

Currently, the YouTube algorithm delivers distinct recommendations to each user. These recommendations are tailored to users’ interests and watch history and weighted based on factors like the videos’ performance and quality.

When deciding what to recommend to each user, the YouTube algorithm takes into account the following:

• What videos have they enjoyed in the past? If you’ve watched a 40-minute video essay about the flags of the world or gave it a like or comment, it’s probably safe to say you found it interesting. Expect more flag content coming your way.
• What topics or channels have they watched previously? If you subscribe to the Food Network’s YouTube channel, the algorithm will likely show you more cooking content.
• What videos are typically watched together? If you watch “How to change a monster truck tire,” and most people who watch that also watch “Monster truck repair 101,” YouTube might recommend that as follow up viewing.

That’s why a Millennial music-lover beauty-queen has a homepage that looks like this:

Of course, YouTube wants to recommend relevant, quality videos to each of its precious users. It’s not exactly a positive experience to follow a suggestion to watch “The World’s 36 Most Stylish Cats” and find it boring, low-quality or weirdly racist.

So how does YouTube evaluate if a video is worthy of recommendation?

I t’s not about the content. The actual content of your video is not evaluated by the YouTube algorithm at all. Videos about how great YouTube is aren’t more likely to go viral than a video about how to knit a beret for your hamster.

“Our algorithm doesn’t pay attention to videos; it pays attention to viewers. So, rather than trying to make videos that’ll make an algorithm happy, focus on making videos that make your viewers happy,” says YouTube .

Instead, YouTube looks at the following metrics for its recommendation algorithm:

• Do people actually watch it? When a video is recommended, do people actually watch it, ignore it, or click “not interested”?
• How long do people watch it? The YouTube algorithm looks at both the view duration and the average percentage viewed to inform the ranking.
• Did viewers like it? Likes and dislikes are evaluated, as are engagement rates and post-watch survey results.
• What is your regional context? The time of day and the language you speak also influence the YouTube algorithm.

How YouTube determines the algorithm

More than 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. Imagine a world without the YouTube algorithm trying to help you find the most relevant content. One word comes to mind: chaos.

That’s why it’s important to understand that the goal of YouTube’s algorithm isn’t to bring you the most popular or the most recent video on your search term. The goal is to bring you the video that you specifically will find the most useful.

That’s why two different YouTube users searching for the same term may see a totally different list of results .

YouTube’s search algorithm prioritizes the following elements :

• Relevance: The YouTube algorithm tries to match factors like title, tags, content, and description to your search query.
• Engagement: Signals include watch time and watch percentage, as well as likes, comments, and shares.
• Quality: To evaluate quality, the algorithm looks at signals to determine the channel’s authority and trustworthiness on a given topic.
• User search and watch history: What have you enjoyed or viewed in the past? This will impact which search results the YouTube algorithm will assume will be helpful.

These factors are combined in slightly different ways, depending on where on YouTube you are receiving recommendations.

YouTube recommends videos in three different places on the platform.

This is what you see when you open up the YouTube app or visit the YouTube website. It’s personalized to each viewer. The recommendation engine selects videos for the Home screen based on:

• Performance of the video
• Watch and search history of the user

Suggested videos

These are the videos recommended alongside the video you’re already watching. The algorithm suggests videos here based on:

• The topic of the current video
• The viewer’s watch history

Each user’s search results will be slightly different thanks to the personalized signals the algorithm takes into account. These signals include:

• The relevance of the title, description, and video content to the search term
• Performance and engagement of video

What is the YouTube Shorts algorithm?

One of the newest formats to enter the YouTube ecosystem is YouTube Shorts . These short, vertical videos created using a smartphone and uploaded directly to YouTube from the YouTube app, like Stories or TikTok videos.

YouTube Shorts have taken the content world by storm. In fact, nearly 70 billion YouTube viewers are watching Shorts daily. So, don’t sleep on this new format.

Now that you know Shorts are great, the question is: how do you get your Shorts discovered?

Well, according to Todd Sherman, the product lead for Shorts, the algorithm for Shorts is different from regular YouTube. Instead of users picking videos to watch, they swipe through content, so the algorithm focuses on showing a variety of videos to keep everyone interested.

Unlike some platforms where just looking at the first frame counts as a view, Shorts requires viewers to actually want to watch, although they won’t say exactly how much. They’re keeping this threshold secret to prevent people from trying to manipulate the system.

Creators are advised to focus on storytelling rather than sticking to a specific video length , even though most Shorts are still kept under a minute. Custom thumbnails are discouraged for Shorts, and while hashtags can be helpful, their impact can vary.

Timing your uploads and the quantity of Shorts you post aren’t crucial factors for optimization , according to YouTube. It’s more about putting out quality content. Shorts might initially get a lot of attention, but their popularity can taper off based on audience reception. YouTube discourages deleting and reposting Shorts repeatedly, as it could be seen as spammy behavior.

Hot tip: You can schedule your YouTube videos via the Hootsuite Dashboard so you have time to focus on more spontaneous YouTube Shorts on the go.

In the future, YouTube intends to introduce features allowing Shorts creators to link to longer videos, showing their commitment to integrating rather than replacing long-form content. Additionally, they’re testing a feature to group uploads from prolific channels, making it easier for viewers to explore content without overwhelming their feed.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what the YouTube Shorts algorithm takes into account:

• Relevance: Do the title, tags, content, and description match the search term?
• Engagement: Do other people like and comment on this video?
• User watch history: What have you enjoyed or viewed in the past?
• Similar content: What other Shorts do similar audiences like to watch?
• Watch time: Less important than for classic videos. But if someone can’t even sit through a 15-second video, that’s probably not a good sign.

Paige Cooper is the Hootsuite Inbound YouTube Lead. She runs Hootsuite Labs , our Youtube channel and she sees Shorts as an opportunity ripe for the taking.

“The rise of vertical video hasn’t changed the main algorithm per se, but YouTube Shorts are creating a big new opportunity for creators,” she says. “If you’re already running an Instagram Reels or TikTok strategy , publishing on YouTube Shorts seems to be an easy win.”

16 tips to improve your organic reach on YouTube

While there are no YouTube algorithm instructions, remember that the algorithm follows the audience. If you already have a YouTube marketing plan in place, these tips will help you grow your channel’s views.

Cue: Eye of the Tiger. This is your YouTube algorithm training.

1. Do your keyword research

There’s no human being sitting at YouTube headquarters watching your video and ranking it.

Instead, the algorithm looks at your metadata as it decides what the video is about, which videos or categories it’s related to, and who might want to watch it.

When it comes to describing your video for the algorithm, you want to use accurate, concise language that people are already using when they search.

For example, if you were uploading a comedy sketch, you should probably include the words “comedy” and “funny” in the title and description and be crystal clear about the topics or subject of the video.

Because YouTube is a search engine as much as a video platform, you can conduct your keyword research in the same way you would for a blog post or web copy : using free tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush.

Once you’ve identified your primary keywords, you’ll want to use them in four places:

• In the video’s file name (i.e., comedy-dad-jokes.mov)
• In the video’s title (using catchy natural language like “Real life dad does stand up comedy for first time”)
• In the YouTube video description (especially within the first two lines, above the fold)
• In the video’s script (and therefore in the video’s subtitles and closed captions—which means uploading an SRT file).

But there’s one place you don’t need to put your keywords:

• In the video’s tags. According to Youtube, tags “play a minimal role in video discovery” and are most helpful if your keyword or channel name is often misspelled. (i.e., standup, stand up, comedy, comedie, etc.) Adding excessive tags to your video description could even harm your video. It’s against YouTube’s policies on spam, deceptive practices, and scams .

Read more about social SEO and YouTube SEO to keep your knowledge brewing.

2. Make your thumbnails click-worthy

But without being clickbaity, obviously.

“Appeal” is the word YouTube uses to describe how a video entices a person to take a risk (albeit a minor one) and watch something new. While YouTube itself doesn’t care what your thumbnail looks like visually, it is keeping track of whether or not people actually click through .

YouTuber Joshua Weissman uses a consistent style for his thumbnails that usually feature his face, a succinct title, and intriguing imagery.

To maximize your video’s appeal:

• Upload a custom thumbnail (and keep the visual style consistent across all your thumbnails)
• Write an intriguing, catchy title—the kind you can’t not click on
• Remember the first sentence or so of the description will show up in search, so make it interesting and relevant.

Feeling like you need a YouTube algorithm tutorial? Check out more tactics to promote your YouTube channel .

3. Keep people watching your video, and all your videos

Once you have a viewer watching one video, make it easy for them to keep watching your content and stay within your channel’s ecosystem.

For instance, the end of Taskmaster episodes feature a card that links to more videos and a prompt to subscribe to the channel.

To keep viewers in your ecosystem, use:

• Cards: Flag relevant other videos in your video
• End screens: End with a CTA to watch another relevant video
• Playlists: Promote a list of topically similar videos
• Subscription watermarks: Allow users to subscribe to your channel within the video itself.

For more on converting viewers to subscribers, read our guide to getting more YouTube subscribers .

Pro Tip: Making a video series is a great way to capitalize on a recent spike in viewers. Using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite can make it easy to pre-plan your monthly factory tour or interview sessions in advance.

4. Attract views from other sources

Views that don’t come from the YouTube algorithm can still inform your success with the algorithm.

For example, you can attract views from YouTube ads , external sites, cross-promoting on social media , and partnerships with other channels or brands can all help you earn views and subscribers, depending on your strategy.

For instance, on the Murphy Beds Canada website, the support section links to a selection of videos that open in YouTube.

The algorithm won’t punish your video for having a lot of traffic from off-site (e.g., a blog post). This is important because click-through-rates and view duration often tank when the bulk of a video’s traffic is from ads or an external site.

According to YouTube’s product team, the algorithm only pays attention to how a video performs in context. So, a video that performs well on the homepage will be surfaced to more people on the homepage, no matter what its metrics from blog views look like.

Pro Tip: Embedding a YouTube video in your blog or website is great for both your blog’s Google SEO as well as your video’s view counts on YouTube.

5. Engage with comments and other channels

In order for your audience to grow , you need to nurture your relationships with your viewers. For many viewers, part of YouTube’s appeal is feeling closer to creators than they do to traditional celebrities.

Use Hootsuite Streams to stay on top of untagged mentions, and stay up to date about every conversation that effects your industry.

6. Don’t stoop to creating clickbait

Racking up views for the sake of views is a lose-lose situation. Maybe you’ve crafted the most titillating thumbnail-title combo of all time and are capturing an outsized amount of attention… but viewers will quickly figure out you’ve tricked them and bounce.

So what did that really gain you?

Not only will you have sullied your brand reputation with a bait-and-switch, you’ll also be punished by the YouTube algorithm. There’s no chance clickbait is going to impress the recommendation engine.

Stick to accurate, quality content, and create titles and thumbnails that properly represent what viewers are going to see.

The challenge is, as YouTuber Alec Wilcock says, “to make sure your videos are actually valuable for your audience. You can’t just want them to be valuable.”

“Viewers can see fluff or filler a mile away, so there’s no phoning it in, or you will see a drop in your watch time,” advises Hootsuite’s Paige Cooper. “It’s a cliche at this point, but every time you say ‘algorithm’ replace that word with ‘audience.’ We aren’t making videos for robots, we’re making them for smart, discerning people who have infinite other ways to spend their time. ” Ask yourself, “Would I watch this?” as much as possible.

7. Keep your eye on the conversation

Your YouTube channel can be a great way to hop on the bandwagon for trending topics. But it’s tough to make a clever response video or weigh in on an issue if you’re not paying attention to what’s going on.

Hootsuite’s keyword search streams are super helpful for social listening . Plug in an industry term or relevant hashtag to keep in the know about conversations in your community.

Creating compelling, relevant content is one of the best ways to impress that YouTube algorithm. One recent video that is doing super well for Hootsuite is our video on The fastest Hootsuite demo EVER (how to manage social media with Hootsuite) .

Hootsuite Streams and keyword research helped inform the strategy that led to this video being created. “We did the research to find a workaround for a common problem people have, and that paid off with a 78% percent retention rate,” Cooper explains.

Google Trends is another great source for keeping in the loop. If you notice a problem people are looking to solve, be the one to solve that problem.

8. Evolve by experimenting

The only way to know what really captures an audience’s attention and gets you that precious watch time is to try, try, try. You’ll never find that secret recipe for success without a little experimentation… and probably a few failures (a.k.a. learning opps) along the way.

Mr. Beast didn’t become the world’s richest YouTuber overnight. By trial and error, he discovered that the wilder and more extravagant his stunts were, the better his views and engagement did. And now he’s, uh, curing blindness. What a time to be alive!

“It’s the little changes and course corrections that add up over time!” says Cooper. “ As a small channel, obviously the dream is to create a piece of gold that goes viral. But as a small educational channel, focusing on practical, valuable videos that we know people already want is important.”

Two tactics that have paid off for Hootsuite Labs are 1) getting more specific (a.k.a. “niching down”) with a topic (i.e., rather than “Instagram vs. TikTok” going after “Instagram vs. TikTok for business”; and 2) being the first to make a video on a topic. “But really both of those mean knowing your audience: what they care about, what they’re problems are, what they’re curious about, and what they want to know,” says Cooper.

Take courage from the fact that if an experiment really bombs, that low-performing video won’t down-rank your channel or future videos in any way. (Unless you have truly alienated your audience to the point where they don’t want to watch you anymore.) Your videos all have an equal chance to earn viewers, according to YouTube’s product team .

9. Get to know your audience

It’s almost impossible to wow your audience if you don’t know who they are. That’s why understanding your target audience and their behavior is so important.

Get to know your YouTube audience by digging into your analytics, either via YouTube directly or using Hootsuite’s audience insights tool.

Understanding their location, their gender, and their age can help inform your content strategy . Watching how they actually interact with your videos—engagement, watch time, and all of those important social media metrics—also will point you in the right direction.

Knowledge! Is! Power!

10. Post at the best time

The YouTube algorithm doesn’t directly base its recommendations on what time or day you post. But the algorithm does take stock of a video’s popularity and engagement. And one surefire way to get more views on YouTube is to post your video when your audience is online.

Prep your videos in advance and then use a scheduling tool for maximum reach . The Hootsuite scheduler, for instance, provides custom recommendations for the best posting time for your audience. Here’s how it works:

11. Don’t just make long videos: make good videos

While the YouTube algorithm rewards watch time, it’s all relative. “Our discovery system uses absolute and relative watch time as signals when deciding audience engagement, and we encourage you to do the same,” says YouTube . “Broadly speaking, relative watch time is more important for short videos and absolute watch time is more important for longer videos.”

So think less about total length when you’re creating a video and more about creating compelling content that keeps the viewer watching through to the end , no matter how long or short your video is.

If they’re dropping off 25% of the way through, that’s not great, whether your video is 6 minutes or 60 minutes.

Pro tip: Check out your audience retention metric to help understand how long your unique viewers like to watch. Then you can adjust your content accordingly.

“You’re constantly learning about your audience, and every win and every loss will tell you something about what they value (or don’t value), which you can apply to your next video,” notes Cooper.

“If you’re losing fifty percent of your audience in the first 30 seconds, try cutting that content. If your average view time is two minutes out of 10, see what happens if you make a five-minute video. Each video is evaluated on its own merits, which means that each video is a new chance to succeed… or fail. (Sorry!)”

Mastering the YouTube algorithm is just one way to get your YouTube channel the attention it deserves , of course. For more on thriving on YouTube, check out our guide to building a custom YouTube marketing strategy . And, ahem, while you’re over there… maybe you’d like to give our channel a little like and subscribe ?

12. Get on the Shorts train

Short form video isn’t going away. In fact, many platforms, including Instagram and YouTube, are paying special attention to short videos — especially as TikTok continues its upward climb.

YouTube has made it clear that YouTube Shorts are its, “ number one area of focus .” In fact, the platform is seeing ad engagement on Shorts rising rapidly, while YouTube’s overall ad revenue is steadily declining — so it’s no big secret where YouTube executive heads are turning.

If you want to stand out on YouTube in 2024, you’re going to want to start posting YouTube Shorts.

Simple, short, and engaging, these quick videos can diversify your content stack on YouTube, and give the platform even more opportunities to rank and promote your channel.

Tired of posting your YouTube Shorts one by one? Quit stalling and start scheduling your YouTube Shorts with Hootsuite . Available on both desktop and mobile apps, Hootsuite makes it easy to plan, post, and analyze your YouTube content from a single dashboard.

Looking to make more money on your Shorts? Check out our YouTube monetization guide .

14. Make your videos accessible to everyone

Social media is used by a diverse and global audience. Your viewers likely come from different countries, backgrounds, and abilities — and you want your content to be easy to access no matter who they are.

Social media accessibility is the process of designing social media content to be inclusive to everyone, including those with disabilities.

On YouTube, this might look like including closed captioning in your videos, adding alt text to your YouTube thumbnails, or using descriptive captions that are easily read by screen readers.

Ignoring social media accessibility will close your content off to a wide range of viewers, which will lead to lower views, less engagement, and overall less boost from the YouTube algorithm.

15. Keep an eye on your best competitors

Sometimes, the best way to get inspiration is by checking out what your competitors are doing right… and wrong.

Does your primary competitor create similar content but get way more views? Maybe this is a sign to analyze their thumbnails, video descriptions, or dive deeper into their cross-promotion strategy.

Similarly, if you notice your videos consistently out-performing the competition, take note of what you’ve done differently lately, as well as what they are failing to do.

The more you know, the more you grow.

16. Analyze, analyze, analyze

As with everything on social media, data is your best friend. If your strategy is stuck, stunted, or stalled, it’s probably time to take a look at your analytics.

Were you performing better this time last year? Do you usually see a slump around the holidays? Maybe you stopped adding closed captions to your videos and are losing viewers because of this.

Without detailed analytics and data tracking, you’re only speculating. Tools like Hootsuite collect intricate data points about your YouTube analytics performance , and make them easy to view and understand in a simple dashboard.

Get clear charts, graphs, and numbers that you can then generate into reports to share with your wider team. Then, use the information gathered to better inform your YouTube videos going forward.

Let Hootsuite make growing your YouTube channel easier. Get scheduling, promotion, and marketing tools all in one place for your entire team. Sign up free today.

Grow your YouTube channel faster with Hootsuite . Easily moderate comments, schedule video, and publish to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Hannah Macready is a freelance writer with 12 years of experience in social media and digital marketing. Her work has appeared in publications such as Fast Company and The Globe & Mail, and has been used in global social media campaigns for brands like Grosvenor Americas and Intuit Mailchimp. In her spare time, Hannah likes exploring the outdoors with her two dogs, Soup and Salad.

Paige Cooper is a lapsed librarian turned copywriter turned inbound marketing strategist who spends her days growing the Hootsuite Labs YouTube channel.

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6 Important Tips on Writing a Research Paper Title

When you are searching for a research study on a particular topic, you probably notice that articles with interesting, descriptive research titles draw you in. By contrast, research paper titles that are not descriptive are usually passed over, even though you may write a good research paper with interesting contents. This shows the importance of coming up with a good title for your research paper when drafting your own manuscript.

Importance of a Research Title

The research title plays a crucial role in the research process, and its importance can be summarized as follows:

Why do Research Titles Matter?

Before we look at how to title a research paper, let’s look at a research title example that illustrates why a good research paper should have a strong title.

Imagine that you are researching meditation and nursing, and you want to find out if any studies have shown that meditation makes nurses better communicators.  You conduct a keyword search using the keywords “nursing”, “communication”, and “meditation.” You come up with results that have the following titles:

• Benefits of Meditation for the Nursing Profession: A Quantitative Investigation
• Why Mindful Nurses Make the Best Communicators
• Meditation Gurus
• Nurses on the Move: A Quantitative Report on How Meditation Can Improve Nurse Performance

All four of these research paper titles may describe very similar studies—they could even be titles for the same study! As you can see, they give very different impressions.

• Title 1 describes the topic and the method of the study but is not particularly catchy.
• Title 2 partly describes the topic, but does not give any information about the method of the study—it could simply be a theoretical or opinion piece.
• Title 3 is somewhat catchier but gives almost no information at all about the article.
• Title 4 begins with a catchy main title and is followed by a subtitle that gives information about the content and method of the study.

As we will see, Title 4 has all the characteristics of a good research title.

Characteristics of a Good Research Title

According to rhetoric scholars Hairston and Keene, making a good title for a paper involves ensuring that the title of the research accomplishes four goals as mentioned below:

• It should predict the content of the research paper .
• It should be interesting to the reader .
• It should reflect the tone of the writing .
• It should contain important keywords that will make it easier to be located during a keyword search.

Let’s return to the examples in the previous section to see how to make a research title.

As you can see in the table above, only one of the four example titles fulfills all of the criteria of a suitable research paper title.

Related: You’ve chosen your study topic, but having trouble deciding where to publish it? Here’s a comprehensive course to help you identify the right journal .

Tips for Writing an Effective Research Paper Title

When writing a research title, you can use the four criteria listed above as a guide. Here are a few other tips you can use to make sure your title will be part of the recipe for an effective research paper :

• Make sure your research title describes (a) the topic, (b) the method, (c) the sample, and (d) the results of your study. You can use the following formula:

[ Result ]: A [ method ] study of [ topic ] among [ sample ] Example : Meditation makes nurses perform better: a qualitative study of mindfulness meditation among German nursing students

• Avoid unnecessary words and jargons. Keep the title statement as concise as possible. You want a title that will be comprehensible even to people who are not experts in your field. Check our article for a detailed list of things to avoid when writing an effective research title .
• Make sure your title is between 5 and 15 words in length.
• If you are writing a title for a university assignment or for a particular academic journal, verify that your title conforms to the standards and requirements for that outlet. For example, many journals require that titles fall under a character limit, including spaces. Many universities require that titles take a very specific form, limiting your creativity.
• Use a descriptive phrase to convey the purpose of your research efficiently.
• Most importantly, use critical keywords in the title to increase the discoverability of your article.

Resources for Further Reading

In addition to the tips above, there are many resources online that you can use to help write your research title. Here is a list of links that you may find useful as you work on creating an excellent research title:

• The University of Southern California has a guide specific to social science research papers: http://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/title
• The Journal of European Psychology Students has a blog article focusing on APA-compliant research paper titles: http://blog.efpsa.org/2012/09/01/how-to-write-a-good-title-for-journal-articles/
• This article by Kristen Hamlin contains a step-by-step approach to writing titles: http://classroom.synonym.com/choose-title-research-paper-4332.html

Are there any tips or tricks you find useful in crafting research titles? Which tip did you find most useful in this article? Leave a comment to let us know!

• Hairston, M., & Keene, M. 2003. Successful writing . 5th ed. New York: Norton.
• University of Southern California. 2017. Organizing your social sciences research paper: choosing a title . [Online] Available at: http://libguides.usc.edu/writingguide/title

Thank you so much:) Have a nice day!

Thank you so much, it helped me.. God bless..

Thank you for the excellent article and tips for creating a research work, because I always forget about such an essential element as the keywords when forming topics. In particular, I have found a rapid help with the formation of informative and sound titles that also conforms to the standards and requirements.

I am doing a research work on sales girls or shop girls using qualititative method. Basicly I am from Pakistan and writing on the scenario of mycountry. I am really confused about my research title can you kindly give some suggestions and give me an approperaite tilte

Hi Zubair, Thank you for your question. However, the information you have provided is insufficient for drafting an appropriate title. Information on what exactly you intend to study would be needed in order to draft a meaningful title. Meanwhile, you can try drafting your own title after going through the following articles our website: https://www.enago.com/academy/top-10-tips-on-choosing-an-attractive-research-title/ , https://www.enago.com/academy/writing-a-good-research-title-things-to-avoid/ , https://www.enago.com/academy/write-irresistible-research-paper-title/ We would be happy to give you feedback and suggest changes if required. Did you get a chance to install our free Mobile App? https://www.enago.com/academy/mobile-app/ . Make sure you subscribe to our weekly newsletter https://www.enago.com/academy/subscribe-now/ .

thanks for helping me like this!!

Thank you for this. It helped me improve my research title. I just want to verify to you the title I have just made. “Ensuring the safety: A Quantitative Study of Radio Frequency Identification system among the selected students of ( school’s name ).

(I need your reply asap coz we will be doing the chap. 1 tomorrow. Thank u in advance. 🙂 )

I am actually doing a research paper title. I want to know more further in doing research title. Can you give me some tips on doing a research paper?

Hi Joan, Thank you for your question. We are glad to know that you found our resources useful. Your feedback is very valuable to us. You can try drafting your own title after going through the following articles on our website: https://www.enago.com/academy/top-10-tips-on-choosing-an-attractive-research-title/ , https://www.enago.com/academy/writing-a-good-research-title-things-to-avoid/ , https://www.enago.com/academy/write-irresistible-research-paper-title/

We would be happy to give you feedback and suggest changes if required. Did you get a chance to install our free Mobile App? https://www.enago.com/academy/mobile-app/ . Make sure you subscribe to our weekly newsletter https://www.enago.com/academy/subscribe-now/ .

That really helpful. Thanks alot

Thank you so much. It’s really help me.

Thanks for sharing this tips. Title matters a lot for any article because it contents Keywords of article. It should be eye-catchy. Your article is helpful to select title of any article.

nice blog that you have shared

This blog is very informative for me. Thanks for sharing.

nice information that you have shared

i’m found in selecting my ma thesis title ,so i’m going to do my final research after the proposal approved. Your post help me find good title.

I need help. I need a research title for my study about early mobilization of the mechanically ventilated patients in the ICU. Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.

Thank you for posting your query on the website. When writing manuscripts, too many scholars neglect the research title. This phrase, along with the abstract, is what people will mostly see and read online. Title research of publications shows that the research paper title does matter a lot. Both bibliometrics and altmetrics tracking of citations are now, for better or worse, used to gauge a paper’s “success” for its author(s) and the journal publishing it. Interesting research topics coupled with good or clever yet accurate research titles can draw more attention to your work from peers and the public alike. You can check through the following search results for titles on similar topics: https://www.google.com/search?q=early+mobilization+of+the+mechanically+ventilated+patients+in+the+icu&rlz=1C1GCEU_enIN907IN907&oq=&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.4920093j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 .

We hope this would be helpful in drafting an attractive title for your research paper.

Please let us know in case of any other queries.

I’ve been surfing online more than 3 hours these days, but I never found any interesting article like yours. It is lovely worth enough for me. In my opinion, if all website owners and bloggers made just right content material as you did, the internet will be much more helpful than ever before.

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Wow that was odd. I just wrote an very long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t show up. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyhow, just wanted to say fantastic blog!

In case the topic is new research before you’re writing. And then to stand out, you end up being different.and be inclined to highlight yourself.

There are many free directories, and more paid lists.

To be honest your article is informative. I search many site to know about writing but I didn’t get the information I needed. I saw your site and I read it. I got some new information from here. I think some of your tips can be applied to those too! Thank you so very much for such informative and useful content.

Nice and well written content you have shared with us. thanks a lot!

Thanks for sharing these tips… Rockwide

Its helpful. a person can grab knowledge through it.

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