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

What should a research title tell the reader?

Start from four questions. You needn’t answer all of them, but know which ones you left out and why.

1. What is the topic? The phenomenon, problem or text.
2. Which variables or concepts? In quantitative work, the main independent and dependent variables. In qualitative or literary work, the central concept or argument.
3. In whom, in what, where? The population, sample, material, region or period. “Farmers” is different from “tenant paddy farmers in the Cauvery delta”.
4. How? The design, when it tells the reader something useful: a randomised trial, a meta-analysis, a case study, a finite element model.

Write the title last. You can’t name the variables precisely until your problem statement and objectives are settled, and a title that was written before them nearly always turns out broader than the study.

The ICMJE recommendations (written for medical journals) put it well: the title should be “a distilled description of the complete article” that, together with the abstract, makes electronic retrieval “sensitive and specific”.

What are the main types of research titles?

Most titles fall into four patterns. Your field and target journal matter more than taste here, so read the titles in the journal’s last two issues before you choose.

A few journals decide for you. Scientific Reports, for example, asks that the title describe the main message of the article “using a single scientifically accurate sentence”, which is a declarative title by another name. PLOS ONE asks that clinical trials, systematic reviews and meta-analyses include the study design in the subtitle, which pushes you towards the two-part pattern.

For an Indian PhD thesis, I’d stick to a descriptive title, with a colon and a subtitle if you need one. Examiners read it as a statement of scope, and a question or a single finding sits awkwardly on a five-chapter thesis.

How long should a research title be?

Limits are set journal by journal, and they differ a lot:

• Scientific Reports: no more than 20 words, and no puns or idioms.
• PLOS ONE: up to 250 characters for the full title, written in sentence case, and “specific, descriptive, concise, and comprehensible to readers outside the field”. Specialist abbreviations should be avoided where possible.

In practice, most strong titles I see in thesis registrations run between 10 and 20 words. Under ten, a title usually leaves out the population or the setting. Over twenty-five, it has turned into a sentence from the abstract. If yours is long, name the two or three variables that carry the study and leave the rest to the abstract.

Read the instructions of the journal you are actually targeting (our guide to choosing a journal helps if you haven’t picked one).

How do you make a research title searchable?

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

• Use the common term, not your private one. If the field says “teacher attrition”, don’t call it “educator exit behaviour”.
• Spell out abbreviations. DNA or GDP are fine. MGNREGA means nothing to a reviewer in Brazil, so describe it (“India’s rural employment guarantee scheme”).
• Put the key terms early. Search results and mobile screens cut long titles off, so the topic should come before the qualifiers.
• Keep the place name if it matters. “Kerala”, “Western Ghats” or “Chennai” help researchers who search by region.

The keyword field on a journal submission is where you add terms that don’t fit in the title: synonyms, the method, the broader discipline. Don’t repeat title words there. More on how the two fit together is in our guide on how to write an abstract.

How are thesis and synopsis titles handled at Indian universities?

At most universities the title is proposed in your registration synopsis and approved by the Doctoral Committee, RAC or Research Degree Committee along with your objectives. It then follows you onto every progress report and the final thesis. (The rest of that document is in our PhD synopsis format guide.)

Why “A study on…” titles get marked down

Browse Shodhganga for a few minutes and you will find plenty of theses titled “A study on…”, “An empirical study of…” or “Some aspects of…”. They add three or four words and tell the reader nothing, because every thesis is a study. Reviewers and editors often ask for them to go, and an examiner who sees one takes it, fairly or not, as a sign that the scholar hasn’t decided what the thesis is about.

The fix is to start with the thing itself. “A study on consumer behaviour towards organic food products in Coimbatore” becomes “Purchase intention for organic food among urban households in Coimbatore”.

At registration, pitch the title at a scope you can finish. A committee will happily approve “water quality of the Noyyal river”, and three years later you will be defending at the viva why you sampled only four stretches of it.

What do weak and stronger research titles look like?

The topics below are made up for illustration. The weak titles are the kind that turn up in first-draft synopses.

Worked example: one title, three drafts

An illustrative case: a commerce scholar’s first draft for her registration synopsis read:

Draft 1: “A study on financial literacy.”

Her objectives were about women running small shops in two districts, and whether training by their lending bank changed how they kept records. None of that was in the title.

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.” That is 28 words, and it opens with filler.

Draft 3: “Bank-led financial literacy training and record-keeping among women micro-entrepreneurs in Salem and Namakkal districts.” Fourteen words. The intervention, the outcome, the population and the setting are all there, and every noun is something a researcher might search for.

A committee might still ask for “Tamil Nadu” to go back in, since the thesis will be read outside the state. That is a fair request, and it costs only two words. To compare alternative phrasings, try our free research title helper, but the final wording should be yours and your supervisor’s.

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

Many journals ask for a shorter version of the title as well. The ICMJE recommendations say that where a journal requires one, it is usually no more than 40 characters, including letters and spaces. PLOS ONE allows up to 100 characters for its short title and asks that it state the topic of the study.

A running title is not an abbreviation of the full title word by word. Keep the core topic: “Bank-led training and record-keeping by women entrepreneurs” is already 59 characters, so “Financial training and record-keeping” (37 characters) would be safer.

Title page layout comes from the style guide or the university. Under APA 7 the paper title is written in title case, in bold, centred in the upper half of the title page, and student papers leave out the running head that professional manuscripts carry. Our APA 7 formatting guide has the full layout. A PhD thesis follows your university’s own title-page format, with the name of the degree, the supervisor and the department in a fixed order; see, for example, our Anna University thesis format guide.

Title checklist before you submit

• A reader can tell your main topic and your key variables or concepts from the title alone.
• The population, place or material is named where it matters to the findings.
• No opening filler: “A study on”, “An empirical study of”, “An investigation into”, “Some aspects of”.
• No abbreviation a stranger would have to look up. SHG, MSME and PHC may be obvious to you; spell them out.
• It fits the journal’s word or character limit.
• It promises nothing the thesis or paper does not deliver. If you tested two districts, it doesn’t say “India”.
• You have searched Shodhganga and Google Scholar for near-identical titles.
• Your supervisor has read it aloud and agreed that it describes the work.