Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Wednesday 25 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.

Comments

Jesse Ruderman
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