Saturday, May 25, 2013

What's in a Title?

I'm not one of those people who go in for "cute" titles for my research papers. Some people obviously do. However, they probably spend way too much of their valuable time conjuring up snappy titles in the hope that they'll come up with something that will attract people's attention.

Ultimately, it's the content of the paper that's going to matter - at least, I like to think that's true! So, most of my published papers have titles that describe what the research is about - but those titles aren't going to win any awards for creativity. I mean, really, titles such as:

  • A saddlepoint approximation to the distribution function of the Anderson-Darling test statistic.
  • Exact asymptotic goodness-of-fit testing for discrete circular data, with applications.
  • Bias reduction for the maximum likelihood estimator of the parameters in the half-logistic distribution.

  • Do you see what I mean? (Assuming you're still awake, that is.)