Adams Llewellyn & Oberlander - Entitlement: what does your title entitle you to?

Killer Titles Using Entitlement: A tool for promoting discussion around the relationships between a research paper's content, citations, abstract and title

Dr Viccy Adams - Leverhulme Trust Writer in Residence at the School of Informatics, Edinburgh University

Clare Llewellyn - PhD Student, School of Informatics, Edinburgh University

Why is a title important?• Signpost

• Hook

• Name

How to Build an Automatic Title Generator?

• Investigate general title structure

• Investigate titles in the Computer Science domain

• Build a rule based text generator (or borrow one)

• Use a grading system to score title produced

Title Investigation3 main types of title:

Declarative"Adipose gene expression prior to wait loss can differentiate and weakly predict dietary response"

Descriptive / neutral"A worldwide phylogeography for the human X chromosome"

Interrogative"Is there rearrangement hotspots for the human genome?"

Most common type of title is descriptive

General Facts:

• Titles which are questions lead to more downloads but less citations of the papers

• Longer titles generally mean less downloads (slightly)• Titles with colons tend to be longer which leads to fewer

downloads and citations*o (but the number of words and the use of colons

increased 1981-2001)• The use of a colon and acronym lead to more citations• Including a country name means less citations• Humour means less citations, but more enjoyment -

because of a lower perception of credibility• Pleasantness means more citations• Google gives higher weighting to title words but not

keywords

Investigation: Computer ScienceBased on 10, 000 article titles in the Computer Science Category from arXiv.org

Statistical and part of speech analysis to this text

Average length of title = 8.91 words

Common Sentence StructureNoun Phrase Verb Noun PhraseNoun Phrase Preposition NounDeterminer Noun Preposition Noun PhraseVerb Noun Phrase Preposition Noun PhraseAdjective Noun Preposition Noun Phrase

Common NounsImage, evaluation, study, time, search, logic, network, design, method, algorithm

Common AdjectivesParallel, intelligent, global, large, polynomial, new, complex, local, distributed

Common Punctuation

! 10

? 139

. 9955

Dr Viccy Adams: [email protected]

Clare Llewellyn: [email protected]