JOURNAL CLUB: The Scent of the Waggle Dance
Martin Fenner
Wednesday, 07 May 2008 21:47 UTC
Thom C, Gilley DC, Hooper J, Esch HE. The scent of the waggle dance. PLoS Biol. 2007;5(9):e228
What I like about this paper? A simple title. An abstract that is understandable. A detailed discussion that puts the results into a larger context. A cool research finding that increases our understanding of a fascinating biological phenomenon.
Earth-shatteringly, the paper also includes an author summary. I wonder whether this summary is really needed.
The waggle dance in action can be seen here.
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Replies
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The title of this nice piece of work is a little against the trend of increasing title lengths we see these days; it’ll catch attention for sure.
The author summary in the PLoS papers, which is intended to give additional information for non-experts, sounds like a good idea but it’s challenging to get it right, because you have similar information in the abstract and likely in the introduction of the manuscript. You can obviously argue whether it is “really needed” but to having the authors and not PR people or other scientists (in news & views) to summarize their work has my support.
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Interestesting graph about the title length. I hate long titles. Many authors think that all the important information of a paper must be in the title. But for that we have the abstract.
We have a blog post and forum discussion about author summaries. In this particular case I thought that the author summary doesn’t add much to the clear abstract.
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Interesting what you write about the author summary, Martin. (As you say, we’ve discussed that in detail elsewhere.)
On the title, of course I wholeheartedly agree that a short, meaningful title is bliss. The vast majority of authors in the cell/molecular/biomedical science areas want to have a lot of keywords in their titles because of search and Abstract&Indexing needs. Hence they are wedded to the long titles that are on the papers they submit. Nature does almost always change titles, but it is arguably not an author service to insist an author removes what she or he regards as essential search terms. And in heavy cell biology, there can be quite a few of those per paper!
I’m not disagreeing with you by any means (actually I agree with you), but am pointing out some practical difficulties for editors and authors in trying to achieve “transparent” titles for readers.
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A long title with all the keywords is of course helpful when scanning through the table of contents of a journal. But does it also help with paper searches (e.g. Pubmed) or automated indexing? In other words, do longer titles translate into more readers or more citations? Or is it just an old habit?
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Martin, I agree to a certain extent about title length, but not whole-heartedly. I like the title to resume the main finding when possible. When it’s too general, to be short, it’s difficult to know what distinguishes this paper from any other on the same theme.
For example, the paper I cited earlier, “The Cellular and Molecular Origins of Beak Morphology” is a good title by your definition. It’s appropriate for Science Magazine. However, had it appeared in Development, which is a journal I read regularly, I would have preferred more discussion of the molecular aspects in either the title or at least the abstract. (Actually, it’s a bit thin on the ground in that respect, despite it being an eminently readable article.)
When the whole article centers around a random molecule, what is one to do? Here is a longish title from a paper for which I am entirely personally responsible: “The cap ‘n’ collar family member NF-E2-related factor 3 (Nrf3) is expressed in mesodermal derivatives of the avian embryo”.
It’s not Nature-worthy, but that was not its target audience. Anyone who is doing a citation search on that gene or its paralogues/homologues can know whether or not they want to look into the rest of the article, without going as far as the abstract. (Otherwise, perhaps “Nrf3” might have sufficed, the way “p53” does now.)
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Heather, you are right that a title can also be too short and uniformative, especially for an expert in the field. Here are the titles of the papers we have in the Good Paper Journal Club (via Connotea):
- The scent of the waggle dance.
- Cardiovascular Events during World Cup Soccer.
- Insect Odorant Receptors Are Molecular Targets of the Insect Repellent DEET.
- Functional Genomic Analysis of C. elegans Molting.
- Inhibition of prostaglandin synthesis as a mechanism of action for aspirin-like drugs.
- The Cellular and Molecular Origins of Beak Morphology.
- Holocene dwarf mammoths from Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic.
- SLAC1 is required for plant guard cell S-type anion channel function in stomatal signalling.
- Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans.
- Molecular structure of nucleic acids; a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid.
My personal thoughts on these titles: #2, #4, #6 and #9 and #10 are very general titles. I like that format, but a little more specific information would be nice. #8 is the typical title for a paper today and for me has a little bit too much information in it. We had a discussion about alternative title for that paper. #7 is similar to #8. only experts in the field know that mammoths were already extinct in most places in the Holocene. #1 is special, because it is a play with words. More like a novel title and maybe not the way to go for most research papers. I like #3 and #5 best, they are general enough but also contain the main finding of the paper.
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