A careful choice of words can perhaps prevent a tragedy. Here’s an example. A minority of human cannibals might become overexcited when they see the title of this study: “Trends in Dietary Quality Among Adults in the United States, 1999 Through 2010,” Dong D. Wang, Cindy W. Leung, Yanping Li, Eric L. Ding, Stephanie E. […]
Tom Gill sent this to us, with the suggestion “Why can’t more scientific papers have evocative, poetic titles like this? I mean, it sounds more like a song than a technical article.” The study is: “The Strength of the Evening Wind,” A. Lapworth, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, vol. 183, 2022, pp. 215–225.
This month’s Tongue-Tripping Title of the Month comes from a study published almost a decade ago: “Time displacement rotational echo double resonance: heteronuclear dipolar recoupling with suppression of homonuclear interaction under fast magic-angle spinning,” Tim W.T. Tsai, Yun Mou, and Jerry C.C. Chan, Journal of Magnetic Resonance, vol. 214, no. 1. January 2012, pp. 315-8. […]
No one has yet (as of this writing) disputed that this is the most important psychology research study published this year: “I’ll Read That!: What Title Elements Attract Readers to an Article?” Robert M. Hallock and Tara N. Bennett, Teaching of Psychology, epub 2020.The authors are at Purdue University. Here’s some detail from the study—from […]
If you’ve ever used The Tube (the underground railway system) in London, there’s a very good chance you’ll know about this announcement : What’s perhaps less well known is the wealth (perhaps even the plethora) of academic papers which have taken advantage of the phrase in their titles. Here are but a few examples : […]
A study with a six-word-long title tells about the effects of study title lengths: “The Advantage of Short Paper Titles,” Adrian Letchford, Helen Susannah Moat, Tobias Preis, Royal Society Open Science, epub August 26, 2015. The authors, at the University of Warwick, UK, report: “Vast numbers of scientific articles are published each year, some of […]
This week’s Awkwardly Worded Study Title is: “Use of Pepto-Bismol in Diarrhea,” W.F. Arndt, Jr. and J.M. Burna, Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 100, no. 5, May 1982, p. 839. Congratulations to the authors, or to the editor, who wrote the title.
This paper qualifies in the competition, if there is one, for Research Paper with the Shortest Title. The paper is: “Q“, by Leon Knopoff [pictured here], Reviews of Geophysics, vol. 2, no. 4, 1964, pp. 625-660. The author, at the Department of Physics and Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, begins: […]
Children’s books, by tradition, have the best titles. This title, on a blog post, begs us to beg its author (Jonathan Losos) to write an entire children’s book on the topic: Anolis Annectens, The Retrograde Anole (Thanks to @BoraZ for bringing this title to our attention.)
Sometimes a study’s title translates awkwardly from one language into another. Here is such a case, with Chinese making an awkward transition into English: “On The Creation Of Piano Music For Children From Tropical Fish By Zhao Xi,” Jing Zhang, Huangzhong-Journal of Wuhan Music Conservatory, January 2003. “The paper show the writer’s opinions on creation […]