How to write a research title for a paper, synopsis or thesis

What should a research title tell the reader?

Begin with four questions. Not every title answers all four, but know which one you dropped and for what reason.

1. What is the topic? The phenomenon, problem or text you are working on.
2. Which variables or concepts? Quantitative work needs the main independent and dependent variables in the title. In qualitative or literary work, put the central concept or your argument.
3. In whom, in what, where? Name the population, sample, material, region or period. “Farmers” and “tenant paddy farmers in the Cauvery delta” are two very different things.
4. How? Mention the design only when it tells the reader something useful, for example a randomised trial, a meta-analysis, a case study or a finite element model.

Keep the title for the last. Till your problem statement and objectives are settled, you cannot name the variables exactly. A title written before these two are ready nearly always covers more ground than the study really does.

The ICMJE recommendations were written for medical journals, but they say it well. As per ICMJE, the title should be “a distilled description of the complete article”. Along with the abstract, it is what makes electronic retrieval “sensitive and specific”.

What are the main types of research titles?

Mostly titles come in four patterns. Your field and target journal should decide the pattern, more than your taste. Before choosing, go through the titles in the journal’s last two issues.

Some journals make the choice for you. Scientific Reports, for example, wants the title to describe the main message of the article “using a single scientifically accurate sentence”. That is nothing but a declarative title. PLOS ONE wants clinical trials, systematic reviews and meta-analyses to give the study design in the subtitle, and so you end up with the two-part pattern.

A PhD thesis in India is safer with a descriptive title, and add a colon and subtitle only when really needed. Examiners take the title as a statement of your scope. A question, or one single finding, looks odd on top of a five-chapter thesis.

How long should a research title be?

Every journal sets its own limit, and the limits are quite different from each other.

• Scientific Reports: maximum 20 words. Puns and idioms are not allowed.
• PLOS ONE: the full title can go up to 250 characters, in sentence case. Here the guidelines say the title must be “specific, descriptive, concise, and comprehensible to readers outside the field”. Specialist abbreviations they ask you to avoid wherever you can.

In the thesis registrations I see, most strong titles have somewhere between 10 and 20 words. A title below ten words usually misses the population or the setting. Above twenty-five words, it has become one more sentence of the abstract. If your title is long, keep the two or three variables that carry the study and move everything else to the abstract.

Always read the author instructions of the journal you are really planning to send the paper to. If you have not decided the journal yet, our guide to choosing a journal will help.

How do you make a research title searchable?

Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar and Shodhganga all match searches against your title.

• Use the term everyone in your field uses. Suppose the literature says “teacher attrition”. A scholar typing the usual term may never come across a paper titled “educator exit behaviour”.
• Spell out abbreviations. Everybody knows DNA or GDP. A reviewer sitting in Brazil will not know MGNREGA, so describe the scheme in words (“India’s rural employment guarantee scheme”).
• Bring the key terms to the front. On a phone or in a search list, mostly only the first part of a long title is visible, so keep the topic there.
• Where the place matters, leave the place name in. Researchers searching by region type a word like “Kerala”, “Western Ghats” or “Chennai”.

The terms which don’t fit in the title can go in the keyword field when you submit to a journal. Synonyms, the method and the broader discipline usually go there. No need to repeat title words there. Our guide on how to write an abstract explains how title, abstract and keywords work together.

How are thesis and synopsis titles handled at Indian universities?

In most universities you propose the title in your registration synopsis. The Doctoral Committee, RAC or Research Degree Committee approves it along with your objectives. After that, the same title goes on every progress report and on the final thesis. (For the rest of the synopsis, see our PhD synopsis format guide.)

Why “A study on…” titles get marked down

Spend a few minutes on Shodhganga and you will see many theses with titles like “A study on…”, “An empirical study of…” or “Some aspects of…”. These openings take three or four words and give the reader no information, because any thesis is a study only. Many times reviewers and editors ask the author to remove them. An examiner who sees such a title may also feel, rightly or wrongly, that you are not clear what your thesis is about.

Drop the filler words and the title can open with the subject itself. So “A study on consumer behaviour towards organic food products in Coimbatore” can be written as “Purchase intention for organic food among urban households in Coimbatore”.

At the time of registration, choose a scope you can really finish. The committee will happily approve a title like “water quality of the Noyyal river”. But three years later, in the viva-voce, you will be the one explaining why you sampled only four stretches of that river.

What do weak and stronger research titles look like?

The topics below are made up only for illustration. The weak titles are the type we keep seeing in first drafts of synopses.

Worked example: one title, three drafts

An illustrative case. A commerce scholar wrote this first draft for her registration synopsis.

Draft 1: “A study on financial literacy.”

Her objectives were about women who run small shops in two districts. Did the training from their lending bank change how these women kept their books, that was her question. The title said nothing about any of these.

Draft 2: “An empirical study on the financial literacy and record-keeping practices of women micro-entrepreneurs in Salem and Namakkal districts of Tamil Nadu with special reference to bank-led training programmes.” Now it is 28 words long, with the filler still sitting in front.

Draft 3: “Bank-led financial literacy training and record-keeping among women micro-entrepreneurs in Salem and Namakkal districts.” Now it is fourteen words. You can see the intervention, the outcome, the population and the setting in it. Every noun is something a researcher may search for.

Even then the committee may tell her to put “Tamil Nadu” back, because people outside the state will also read the thesis. She can agree to that, as it costs only two more words. To compare different phrasings, try our free research title helper. The final wording you have to decide with your supervisor.

What are a running title and short title, and how is the title page laid out?

Many journals also want a shorter form of the title. Where a journal asks for one, ICMJE says it is usually 40 characters or less, spaces also counted. For PLOS ONE the short title can be up to 100 characters, and it has to state the topic of the study.

Don’t make the running title by cutting the full title word by word. What you must keep is the core topic. For example, “Bank-led training and record-keeping by women entrepreneurs” already comes to 59 characters. “Financial training and record-keeping” has 37 characters, so that is the safer one.

How the title page looks depends on the style guide or the university. APA 7 wants the paper title in bold and title case, centred somewhere in the upper half of the title page. Student papers don’t have the running head which professional manuscripts carry. For the full layout please check our APA 7 formatting guide. A PhD thesis uses your own university’s title-page format. There the degree name, the supervisor and the department come in a fixed order. Our Anna University thesis format guide shows one such example.

Title checklist before you submit

• Just by reading the title, a person can make out your main topic and your key variables or concepts.
• Where the population, place or material matters to the findings, the title names it.
• There is no filler at the start, like “A study on”, “An empirical study of”, “An investigation into” or “Some aspects of”.
• There is no abbreviation which an outsider has to look up. SHG, MSME and PHC look obvious to you, but write them in full.
• The title is within the word or character limit of the journal.
• The title does not promise anything the thesis or paper is not giving. With data from just two districts, you have not written “India” in the title.
• You have checked Shodhganga and Google Scholar for titles that are almost the same.
• Your supervisor heard you read out the title and said yes, this is the work actually done.