I had conversations today with Megan Bedell (Flatiron) and Kate Storey-Fisher (NYU) about titles for their respective papers. I am slowly developing a whole theory of writing papers, which I wish I had thought about more when I was earlier in my career. I made many mistakes! My view is that the most important thing about a paper is the title. Which is not to say that you should choose a cutesy title. But it is to say that you should make sure the person scanning a listing of papers can estimate very accurately what your paper is about.
I then think the next most important thing is the abstract. Write it early, write it often. Don't wait until the paper is done to write the abstract! The abstract sets the scope. If you have too much to put into one abstract, split your paper in two. If you don't have enough, your paper needs more content. And unless you are very confident that there is a better way, obey the general principles (not necessarily the exact form) underlying the A&A structure of context, aims, methods, results.
Then the next most important thing is (usually) the figures and captions. My model reader looks at the title. If it's interesting, the reader looks at the abstract. If that's interesting, they look at the figures. If all that is interesting, maybe they will read the paper. Since we want our papers to be read, and we want to respect the time of our busy colleagues, we should make sure the title, abstract, and figures-plus-captions are well written, accurate, unambiguous, interesting, and useful.
So I spent time today working on titles.
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