LAUSR

Some years ago, I wrote a paper about the differences between articles that are simply written to be published, and those that are written to be read (Kinchin 2005). As an editor, I am now even keener to see articles that people would actually want to read, and go on to be used to inform further research. The role of the journal is to disseminate information to the readership, but how do we ensure that the information reaches its target (i.e. gets read)? Whilst there are a number of factors that influence the citation rates of an article (Tahamtan, Afshar, and Ahamdzadeh 2016), one of the factors that may help to attract the reader in the first instance is the attractiveness of the title (Nair and Gibbert 2016). In their reviews of the literature on the subject, these authors observe a certain variability in conclusions that can be drawn, but do raise a number of interesting points that prospective authors should consider when submitting their papers for publication in JBE. One of the conclusions that Nair and Gibbert make (drawing particularly on the study conducted by Paiva, Lima, and Paiva 2012), is that articles with shorter titles are likely to have a higher citation count than articles with longer titles. This is possibly because the short title signals a clear focus that may be more appealing to the audience and easier to understand. Papers can be seen to have titles that are ‘declarative’ (including the study’s main conclusions), ‘descriptive/neutral’ (describing the subject – as in title one here), and ‘interrogative’ (in a question format as in title two here). Paiva, Lima, and Paiva (2012) also classified titles as ‘methods-describing’ or ‘results-describing’, concluding that results-describing articles are more often cited. It is worth noting that after conducting their study, Paiva Lima and Paiva gave their paper a results-describing title. The review by Tahamtan, Afshar, and Ahamdzadeh (2016) also concluded that reference to a particular country or geographical location in the title predicts poor citation. It seems that readers are not really interested whether or not a study is undertaken in a primary school in Peru, or in a university in America, but are more interested in the central concepts that are being investigated and the generalisable points being made. Stressing a geographical location seems to send a message that the paper may have a parallel geographical limitation in terms of significance or reader interest. Prospective authors should note that none of the top downloaded papers from JBE contain a geographical reference in their title. Additionally, the use of titular colons is a topic that appears to split opinion – consider the two titles offered for this editorial. Some authors have suggested that the use of the colon to create a ‘compound title’ can be perceived as an indicator of scholarly quality, though this is more prevalent in the social sciences than in other disciplinary areas. It may be that within a discipline that often uses titular colons that the absence of this format will look ‘odd’. However, it does allow the author to use ‘attention grabbers’ whilst still being informative. This seems to work so long as there is a reasonable balance between the two halves of the title.