Thursday, 26 March 2015

Paper Titles

A few tips on computer science paper titles:

Titles of the form Catchy Project Name: What Our Project Is About are stilted. Show some imagination.

Titles of the form Towards [Some Goal We Totally Failed To Reach] are an obvious attempt to dress up failure as success. Don't do that.

Do write bold papers about negative results. Call your paper [Our Idea] Doesn't Work (And Here's Why) and I'll be excited to read it.

[Goal] Is Harder Than You Think would also get my attention.

If your paper title contains the word Aristotelian, I will never read your work again and skip the conference too --- but you get points for chutzpah.

Note: following this advice may harm your career. Consider a career where you don't have to publish or perish.

1 comment:

  1. Based on your positive examples, is it fair to generalize your advice
    as "Go full Buzzfeed"? If so, here's a suggestion for your next paper
    title:

    We Built a Time-Traveling Debugger and You Won't Believe What Happened
    Previously

    ReplyDelete