First of all, we should understand that scientific papers are not popular books, so the titles should also contain some accurate and appropriate keywords, so that the articles can be easily retrieved by experts in the same field and a few readers who study the same problem.
First, matters needing attention in writing the title
1. Honesty. This is the most basic point. No matter what skills and language you use, the topic must be honest, neither nonsense nor exaggeration, nor need to be too low-key
2. Pay attention to the writing of English words. Although most articles in the world are written in English, some words are written differently in different regions. For example, the American and British English spellings of the word "steam" are vapor and vapor respectively. Therefore, it is necessary to modify the spelling of these words according to the location of the journal (pay attention to whether it is in Britain or North America). In fact, the spelling of words will not have a direct impact on the reception of articles, but a little attention will make you more professional and careful, which will definitely leave some good impressions on the editors.
3. Use less structures with prepositions. Prepositions can be used to connect sentence components, but some prepositions in the topic (often not a complete sentence) will cause ambiguity, such as with, for, by and so on. With can mean "and" or "use". In the English world, the meaning of prepositions is very subtle. Therefore, it is best for non-native English writers to use these ambiguous prepositions as little as possible in their titles. If they really need to use it, they must first ask scholars in English-speaking countries.
4. Be as brief as possible. Concise titles are often more attractive than lengthy titles, with clear logical relationship and more prominent focus. Being able to summarize the essence of a long scientific research paper into a short title is also a manifestation of academic skill.
Second, several skills to optimize the title
1. Highlights should be concentrated in an eye-catching position.
The most important information is usually placed at the beginning, followed by other secondary information, such as research fields, materials, methods or applications. For example, the softening of nanocrystalline metals at very small grain sizes (Nature, 1998). At first sight of this title, readers can grasp the key point of this article at once, that is, softening. The research field and material in the second half of the topic is nano-metal with very small grain size, which further highlights the previous focus, because people's common sense is that the finer the grain, the higher the strength, but here it is said to be softening, which attracts readers to read further. On the contrary, if the title is "Nanocrystalline metal softens under extremely small grain size", then the key points and highlights are not as clear as the original.
But there are exceptions If the topic is a complete sentence (complete subject, predicate and object), then the focus is on the part with the verb (predicate) as the core. For example, in the following example, glucocorticoid-induced thymocyte apology is related to the activation of endogenous endonuclease (Nature, 1980), and the focus is on the relationship between apoptosis and endogenous endonuclease, rather than glucocorticoid-induced thymocyte apoptosis. This is not only a point that we should pay attention to when writing our own titles, but also allows us to understand the key points when we see the titles of other people's articles.
2. Rational use of various forms of verbs
After reading a certain number of documents, it will be found that most of the titles are not complete sentences, and the predicate part is usually omitted, but it does not mean that there are no verbs, but verbs generally become corresponding nouns, gerunds, infinitives, participles or passive forms to express the relationship between different keywords and research priorities. Therefore, it is very important to use various forms of verbs correctly!
3. The more specific the modifier, the better
Proper use of adjectives or adverbs and specific numbers to modify the key points in the title can not only highlight the specific characteristics of a certain aspect of the key content, but also attract readers' attention more effectively. However, it should be noted that the more specific the modifier, the better. If you can use numbers, try not to use adjectives. If you can only use adjectives, you must also use specific and objective adjectives to avoid subjective colors.
We'd better not use or use less words like "new", "new" and "first". First of all, because these words are big and empty, they can't provide any practical and useful information; In addition, we need "new discoveries" and "first breakthroughs" to do research and publish papers. "New" and "novel" are the default settings. Why do you want to make unnecessary emphasis in the title that cherishes words like gold?
4. Choose keywords carefully
A good topic is actually composed of several keywords, and a reasonable choice of keywords is the most effective key information to provide readers with the core essence of an article.
We should also be clear that when searching for target documents, we all search through several well-known keywords in a certain field plus a specific small question. Therefore, when we choose keywords, we need to be within a certain range (each field must have its own established keywords).
5. Make good use of abbreviations
Abbreviations will appear in many literature titles. Abbreviations have many advantages, such as facilitating readers in the same field to understand the content of the article, making the title more concise and so on.
Of course, we can also create our own abbreviations to make our new methods or discoveries easier to remember, and to facilitate other authors to quote our articles in the future.
In fact, there are some risks in using abbreviations, because there are bound to be some readers who don't understand their meaning, which may prevent them from continuing reading articles. Therefore, how to use abbreviations depends on the knowledge range of your target readers.
take sb by surprise
In the topic, proper use of some contrasting and unexpected words, or questioning some accepted common sense, will greatly stimulate people's curiosity and want to have a look in the article.
Pay attention to punctuation.
The punctuation marks that often appear in the topic are colons, dashes and quotation marks. The colon (:) is mainly used for explanation and emphasis; Dashes (-) are mainly used for explanation; Quotes ("") are mainly used to emphasize or introduce some unexpected words. When we use punctuation marks, we should choose them reasonably according to the logical relationship of the title itself.
The above are the writing skills and methods of some thesis topics summarized by Zhi Yi, and you can grasp them rationally according to your own actual situation. The editors compiled by Zhiyi come from biomedical, material science, chemistry, computer science, environmental science and other professional fields, and each person has more than 15 years of experience in polishing SCI papers. Therefore, if you encounter any problems in the process of submitting the SCI paper, you can log in to official website, a compilation center, for consultation. For newly registered users, we can provide professional paper duplicate checking service for free.