Titles and abstracts are the most viewed and read part of any book or article. They help any scholar to get interested or not in a specific book or research article. Research points to several tips that can be followed to write more attractive titles.

Letchford, Moat, & Preis (2015) confirm the advantage of short paper titles. Their study explains that short titles attract researchers and therefore, papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper. Jacques & Sebire (2010) analyze the impact of article titles on citation hits. This study adds relevant information as well. According to their results, the number of citations was positively correlated with the length of the title, the presence of a colon in the title and the presence of an acronym while factors that predicted poor citation included reference to a specific country in the title.

Finally, I’d like to point to Paiva, Lima,& Paiva‘s interesting research (2012) that states that articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often. In their words “Short-titled articles had higher viewing and citation rates than those with longer titles. Titles containing a question mark, containing a reference to a specific geographical region, and that used a colon or a hyphen were associated with a lower number of citations. Articles with results-describing titles were cited more often than those with methods-describing titles. After multivariate analysis, only a low number of characters and title typology remained as predictors of the number of citations”.
All these studies and their results on writing good titles are relevant for authors, reviewers, and editors.