I don't think problems with titles are as big of an issue for biological sciences as they are social sciences but I found some useful tidbits in this article by Patrick Dunleavy. Although it might be considered poor taste, but I wish that some published examples were given - otherwise we might be arguing a strawman.
Personally, I like titles that are essentially a statement of the primary result, even if negative results. Vagueness is never a positive attribute in science - unless, of course, results are vague.
Should scientific results be treated like your naughty bits to be hidden within the results so that only a faithful reader that has stuck with you from your vague abstract to your hypothesis-lacking introduction can finally be enlightened in the final part of your discussion?
No.
The title should be informative and the results should be up front with accessory information in the end.
"Dynamite causes death in songbirds of northern Wales"
"Periodic outbursts increases parental care in southern chickadees"
"Novel stimuli fails to elicit a response in frozen waterfowl in southern Uganda"
Ecological research and life at mid-sized liberal arts university
"Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (an infamous spoof)
ReplyDelete"Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, a Nazi Pilot Named Hanna, and the Contigencies of Postcolonial History-Writing" (from a recent volume of the American History Review)
"Evolutionary and dispersal history of Eurasian house mice Mus musculus clarified by more extensive geographic sampling of mitochondrial DNA" (From a recent volume of Nature. To be fair, the abstract made the conclusions clear, but with a title that long one might have hoped for some hint of the conclusions. How about "Mitochondrial DNA sampling reveals Southwestern Asian origin and cladal structure of Mus musculus"?. There. I said more in fewer words.)
Yea, Nature always gives me something chewy: either the title or the article or both. Love the paleo stuff but they even make ecology papers hard to swallow. (notice how everything relates to food?)
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