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What’s in a Title—and What’s Missing? O
ver the past few years, there has been a slow but steady decline in the descriptive content of the titles of many of the papers submitted to this journal. Examples of less-informative titles (fictitious for the present purpose) are: “A Biosensor for Unusual Chiral Lipids in Olive Oil”, “A Novel Array for Carbon Aerosols”, and “Detection of Glycoproteins in Cell Lysates of E. ostrichus”. The author may intend such titles to provide tantalizing glimpses of the chemistry uncovered and the chemical understanding now made possible. However, the primary purpose of Analytical Chemistry is to publish significant advances in the science and practice of chemical analysis or, more broadly, chemical measurements. A reader comes to the journal looking for that kind of new information. A reader conducting a literature search using the title-and-abstract parameters “lipid chemistry” and “fluorescence” may well miss the relevant paper above, “A Biosensor for Unusual Chiral Lipids in Olive Oil”, and the information is effectively lost. The vague title creates other problems as well; for example, editorial consideration of the paper (assignment of Editor and choice of reviewers) is hampered by the lack of immediately obvious measurement information. What has changed since previous years, when the measurement approach was always specified in the title or abstract of a research paper? This question has multiple answers. The conceptual foundations of many analytical methods are becoming well established, and there is a whole marketplace of “off-the-shelf ” instruments available. Consequently, the author’s feeling that the measurement itself is routine leads him/her to put more emphasis on the chemistry being studied. Many authors who are currently submitting papers were trained in other chemistry subdisciplines and simply don’t have as strong a focus on the measurement part of analytical chemistry. Another reason probably is that, until now, Analytical Chemistry has had no announced guidelines on the issue.
© 2004 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Titles of research publications are “advertisements”—the author is stating what kind of advance he/she offers the analytical community. It is important that the author choose the title for maximum visibility. It is, of course, a good thing that modern analytical chemists are making significant contributions to the understanding of chemical behavior. In that sense, the subject of this Editorial is a good problem to have. However, Analytical Chemistry is a measurement-science journal. Accordingly, authors submitting to it will begin to experience pressure from the Editors to include methodology-specific words in the titles (and/or abstracts) of articles. For example, the above titles might become “A Fluorescence-Based Biosensor for Unusual Chiral Lipids in Olive Oil”, “A Novel Mass Spectrometric Sensor for Carbon Aerosols”, and “Capillary Electrophoretic Detection of Glycoproteins in Cell Lysates of E. ostrichus”. Many papers, of course, use multiple measurement approaches; then, the abstract must carry more of the description. I believe that one can convey excitement about the chemistry analyzed as well as about the methodology. On a related point, some of the words used in the above examples add little to the description of content. Guess what they are! Novel, sensor, and biosensor. “Novel” is such a useless word that the Journal of the American Chemical Society has banned it from titles; if the work is not novel, why should it be published in a good journal? Authors are using the labels “sensor” and “biosensor” today so loosely and so far from their technical meanings that they are beginning to convey nothing at all. I suggest that authors always modify these two words with a method-oriented adjective; they will then convey a more useful advertisement.
N O V E M B E R 1 , 2 0 0 4 / A N A LY T I C A L C H E M I S T R Y
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