If you write a paper, how do you get people to read it? Surprisingly few take the sensible approach, a variation on something you were probably told as a child: 'If you don't have something awesome to say (about cancer/ion channels/dinosaurs), say nothing at all.' Fewer take my favourite approach: have an amusing name. Even something childish that I'd normally take perfectly seriously will make me far liklier to want to cite you in an essay. Wang, for example. Or something with unusual characters, like an o with a line through it. If I can't pronounce it, I want to write it lots. Maybe I should write a paper on that, once I've changed my name to the result of mashing my hand into my keyboard. Or Dong.
Of course, there are plenty of people who just try to make bad jokes in their titles. As a general rule, scientists trying to be funny are more or less ultimately pathetic. I have begrudgingly read 'Keeping abreast of the mammary epithelial hierarchy and breast tumorigenesis'. A lot of scientists, either intentionally or as a result of their own strange minds, just give their papers really odd titles. 'Evolution of the human X--a smart and sexy chromosome that controls speciation and development' contained an anthropomorphised 'sexy' X chromosome brandishing a whip. The fact that three whole people were involved in creating this paper and not one of them thought that this was a bad idea should make you scared for all humanity: these are people with access to lasers.
But then, there are papers that are unredeemably awful: 'Vulvodynia and chronic pelvic and perineal pain' springs to mind. Gragh.
Monday, June 27, 2011
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