Why do academics choose useless titles for articles and chapters?

Four steps to getting a better title.

An informative title for an article or chapter maximizes the likelihood that your audience correctly remembers enough about your arguments to re-discover what they are looking for. Without embedded cues, your work will sit undisturbed on other scholars’ PDF libraries, or languish unread among hundreds of millions of other documents on the Web. Patrick Dunleavy presents examples of frequently used useless titles and advises on using a full narrative title, one that makes completely clear your argument, conclusions or findings. 


From LSE: The Impact Blog, Feb 5th 2014 (work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License)

How Articles Get Noticed and Advance the Scientific Conversation

Gozde Ozakinci, a lecturer at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, offers an exemplary use of Twitter in a research workflow.

I dip in and out during the day and each time I have a nugget of information that I find useful. I feel that with Twitter, my academic world expanded to include many colleagues I wouldn’t otherwise meet. … The information shared on Twitter is so much more current than you would find on journals or conferences.

The good news is you’ve published your manuscript! The bad news? With two million other new research articles likely to be published this year, you face steep competition for readers, downloads, citations and media attention — even if only 10% of those two million papers are in your discipline.

So, how can you get your paper noticed and advance the scientific conversation? 
One word: Tweet.

From: Victoria Costello, March 30 2015, on PLOS Blogs,              blogs.plos.org/plos

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme Report

Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme Report

The Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP), 

together with African Minds 

and SARUA, (Southern African Regional Universities Association)

 has just produced an important report

 (authors: Henry Trotter, Catherine Kell, Michelle Willmers, Eve Gray & Thomas King)

entitled  

"SEEKING IMPACT AND VISIBILITY : Scholarly Communication in Southern Africa"

From the executive summary:

African scholarly research is relatively invisible for three primary reasons:
1. While research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is
falling in comparative terms (especially as other Southern countries such as China
ramp up research production), reducing its relative visibility.
2. Traditional metrics of visibility (especially the ISI/WoS Impact Factor) which
measure only formal scholar-to-scholar outputs (journal articles and books) fail to
make legible a vast amount of African scholarly production, thus underestimating
the amount of research activity on the continent.
3. Many African universities do not take a strategic approach to scholarly
communication, nor utilise appropriate information and communications
technologies (ICTs) and Web 2.0 technologies to broaden the reach of their
scholars’ work or curate it for future generations, thus inadvertently minimising
the impact and visibility of African research.

Recommendations: 

To university administrations
•Offer a reduction in teaching time to scholars who demonstrate ambitious research activity.
•Establish digital platforms for sharing publication success by university scholars.
•Develop policies mandating that all publicly funded research be made open access
•Put all university-affiliated journals online and make them open access
•Induce academic staff to create personal profiles on their departmental web pages
•Establish or identify support service providers who can translate scholars’ research for government- and community-based audiences.
•Develop a network of communication officers/content managers so that disparate dissemination activity can be pursued in a more cohesive and strategic manner.
•Encourage scholars to share their research insights on Wikipedia.
•Invest in training for library staff so that they can operate effectively in the new scholarly communication landscape.
•Train and incentivise scholars to use Web 2.0 platforms

 To university scholars
• Share responsibility with the administration for research visibility. Communicate research findings to the audiences that could best leverage them for developmental purposes.

Maximizing The Impacts Of Your Research

‘Maximizing The Impacts Of Your Research: A Handbook For Social Scientists’

 now available to download as a PDF

In the past, there has been no one source of systematic advice on how to maximize the academic impacts of your research in terms of citations and other measures of influence. And almost no sources at all have helped researchers to achieve greater visibility and impacts with audiences outside the university. Instead researchers have had to rely on informal knowledge and picking up random hints and tips here and there from colleagues, and from their own personal experience.This Handbook remedies this key gap and opens the door to researchers achieving a more professional and focused approach to their research from the outset.

from: LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog 14th April 2011

A guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities

Available now: a guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities

How can Twitter, which limits users to 140 characters per tweet, have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?

We have put together a short guide answering these questions, showing new users how to get started on Twitter and hone their tweeting style, as well as offering advice to more experienced users on how to use Twitter for research projects, alongside blogging, and for use in teaching.

from the LSEIpactBlog dated 29 September 2011