I am making a repository of resources for scientific writing with real world examples, geared towards whoever wants to improve their writing skills (including myself). One thing that has helped me is to read examples of amazing paper -whether it was the organization, titles, limitations, discussion, data visualization, abstract, methods (qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, systemic review).
Here are few that we have circulated within our team in no particular order on good titles (some have good content too) .
- “Money talks, bullshit walks” interrogating notions of consumption and survival sex among young women engaging in transactional sex in post-apartheid South Africa: a qualitative enquiry. https://doi.org/10.1186/1744-8603-9-28
- “Getting caught with our plants down: the risks of a global crop yield slowdown from climate trends in the next two decades”. Thank you Marie Spiker for sharing on twitter. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/7/074003/meta
- “Man is not a Mouse”. Thanks to Laura Caulfield for mentioning this at the Nepal MAL-ED workshop eons ago. https://jlb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1189/jlb.1106702
- “Eggs: the uncracked potential for improving maternal and young child nutrition among the world’s poor”. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24807641/
- “Mothers Care More, But Fathers Decide: Educating Parents about Child Health in Uganda” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29553628/
- “Can the poor organize? Public goods and self-help groups in rural India” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305750X19300944
- “Come back when you’re dying:” the commodification of AIDS among California’s urban poor. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12365525/
- “Locusts are now our beef”: adult mortality and household dietary use of local environmental resources in rural South Africa. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2830104/
- “From the Chacra to the Tienda: Dietary delocalization in the Peruvian Andes”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07409710.2018.1490376
- “The household in anthropology: Panacea or problem?”. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00988157.1991.9977987
- “What is a Market?” On the Methodology of a Contested Concept. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760050204300
And a COVID-19 title: “Covibesity,” a new pandemic. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7371584/
I realized that while I was putting this list together, I liked the titles that used variations of common idioms, questions, hyperbolic comparisons (‘man to mouse’ and ‘locusts to beefs’), and amalgamated words (‘Covibesity’) — because these grab attention. Obviously, qualitative papers have the best titles. For quantitative papers, I like titles that ask questions because when you read the title question, you answer them and click on the body of work to see if the answer is validated.
Do you have favorite title that you really enjoyed? Drop a comment or tweet, I will include in this list (with proper attribution to you for finding it!).
Thank you for reading.
