If I wasn’t about to dash off and give my group talk, I’d have time to do this properly. So I’m going to solicit m’learned colleagues’ opinion.
I was reading a Table of Contents from a particular journal this morning and murmured to myself “A snappy little title” at
Phosphorylated Ssk1 Prevents Unphosphorylated Ssk1 from Activating the Ssk2 Mitogen-Activated Protein Kinase Kinase Kinase in the Yeast High-Osmolarity Glycerol Osmoregulatory Pathway
— and then I noticed something very odd, that actually always gives me pause when I’m thinking about titles for articles and posters. Just what is it with the random capitalization? Why, for example, in
Polyubiquitination of Prolactin Receptor Stimulates Its Internalization, Postinternalization Sorting, and Degradation via the Lysosomal Pathway
is ‘Its’ capitalized, but ‘via’ not?
Here’s another odd one:
hnRNP H and hnRNP F Complex with Fox2 To Silence Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor 2 Exon IIIc
‘To’ but not ‘With’?
Now, my first thought would be to blame the authors, but I think it’s more a matter of house style. Nature seems to do things sensibly (randomly chosen):
On the spontaneous emergence of cell polarity
as does Journal of Cell Science:
Caspase-dependent and -independent lipotoxic cell-death pathways in fission yeast
Other journals screw up:
Solution Structure of the cGMP Binding GAF Domain from Phosphodiesterase 5: INSIGHTS INTO NUCLEOTIDE SPECIFICITY, DIMERIZATION, AND cGMP-DEPENDENT CONFORMATIONAL CHANGE
(JBC)
Reservations About Dam Findings
(Science)
yet PNAS and JCB are be sensible.
After thinking a little bit about this, I think the first word of the title and proper nouns should be capitalized, and the rest in lower case. It makes more sense and is less confusing (exceptions might be made for German language journals, I guess). What do all y’all think?
Shouldn’t via actually be via, and thus not be capitalized (as it’s foreign, and has suspicious eyes)?
Perhaps the titles are written by internet cranks. Luckily for us, they’re not allowed to use colour.
I agree, Richard. Simplicity is best. Of course, in Earlier Times people Capitalized in what seemed to be a Random Manner, so the House Styles of Some Journals might be an Archaic Affectation. But at least they don’t try to adopt the ConvE’NtioNS of the KLINgoN emPIR’e.
I always thought that the more capital letters you put in your title to more truthful the content of the rest of the article/poster/talk.
I think I had only one capital letter in the title of my latest paper.
(Just checked. I had three!)
in which case, mark, how can one interpret the undercapitalization of your own distinguished handle?
They Really Destroyed My Ego When I Did My PhD?
Nah. That happens to everybody.
Then I would like to put forward the theory that modern internet use undermines the use of capitalization. Which would imply I have been hanging around on the internet too much.
Editing our database of staff publications I come across this very often, but with the added complication that many of the titles get even more mangled by PubMed/Web of Science etc.
And if someone gets their italicisation or capitalisation wrong (e.g. gene names, species names etc) I have the quandary of whether to correct it in our database or leave it as is in the original. Strictly speaking we leave things as they are (we call this “literary warrant” in cataloguing-speak) but it just looks wrong sometimes. Perhaps I should add (sic) – or should that be sic?
A quick scan through the stack of papers on my untidy desk suggests that recently there is more consistency in article titles (at least in Materials Science) with initial capital followed by all lower case being the standard for Elsevier Journals and RSC. However Elsevier capitalizes after a colon but RSC does not. ACS journals and Wiley seem to prefer the random capitalization convention.
A deeper dig into the pile of papers (that would be a serous hazard if Manchester was an earthquake zone) reveals that in the past (1990s) there seemed to be considerable variation with some journals using all upper case for titles and even varying dramatically in style within a single issue.
Perhaps there is now better editorial oversight.
Capitalizing after a colon is an American thing, even in prose. I can’t stand it, myself.
I’m with Bob on via, and this useful grammar liking person has the following to say about titles, which I think clarifies things:
So, if the title of your paper is a sentence, avoid capitalisation. If not, go and ask someone in the English department of your academic institution who might know about these things. Or rely on the journal to decide.
What makes you think that people in the English dept know about these things?
Never mind titles, I’ve been trying to download and format a pile of data (LTER stuff, for those who know). The data has built up over the years, and one of the many screw-ups inconsistencies has been with changing how the plot names are capitalized.
Thanks to a basic knowledge of regular expression, that’s one of the easier problems to solve. The fact that several plots don’t exist was a bigger problem. Oh, and the description of the data has one species too many.
I just found this one in my “DNA Repair” folder, from Nature Clinical Practice Neurology:
Mechanisms of Disease: DNA repair defects and neurological disease
Perhaps there’s a series of review articles that forces capitalization in the title preceding the colon, and then reverts to standard Nature format?
My impression, unsupported by actual statistics, is that the consistency of nomenclature for genes and proteins, in journal article titles, has improved over the last decade or so. It used to be rather helter-skelter, with regards to use of italics and capitalization; perhaps the improvement is the consequence of meetings and symposia on nomenclature.