How To Write a Perfect Title for Journal Articles

How To Write a Perfect Title for Journal Articles
In the modern digitally enhanced world of almost infinite accessibility for scholarly writing, creating the perfect title for an academic or scientific book or article is more important than ever. An effective title must appear when potential readers search for information on the topic of your research and it must also inspire enough interest and seem relevant enough that those readers click on it to discover more, such as the abstract for an article or the description, summary or table of contents for a book.

A title that clearly and thoroughly summarises the argument of an article or book based on what the research revealed can be most effective for attracting readers. The language should be concise because search engines will often cut long titles short, so a wise policy is to begin with the information that describes the most important aspect or focus of your argument or findings and to keep your title as brief as possible. The words you use in your title should also be precise: readers need to find your book or article via those words, and they also need to recognise through your title that your work is relevant to their interests and requirements. Specialised and theoretical terminology may be appropriate, but only if it is current, enduring and likely to be used by the readers you are hoping to attract. Obscure, archaic or ambiguous language, although rather popular in the humanities for its implications and connotations, can render your writing invisible to readers simply because they are highly unlikely to type in the terms as you have used them, and when your title is found, such terms can prove confusing or misleading.

An effective title should also be striking and memorable. Even when readers are intrigued enough by your title to download your writing, purchase it from a bookstore or borrow it from a library, they will still need to remember it in order to use and cite it in their own writing weeks, months or years after initially reading it. A striking title that accurately describes the contents of a piece and is easily remembered by readers will be found again online, in a extensive pdf collection, in a library catalogue or on a bookshelf much more easily than one that is mundane and imprecise.

Before finalising your title, type the whole of it (within double quotation marks) into search engines such as Google Books. Ideally, you will find nothing else out there with the exact same title, but if your title does turn up, consider rewording it. You can also search for a few of the most distinctive words in your title, but in that case an absence of matches is not as good as a modest number of matches. You also want to be sure that the main words in your title are usually, if not always, used with the meanings you intend and that they appear in association with your topic or subject matter. If so, it is more likely that readers will find your article or book through those words and that your writing will be in relevant company in search results.