Learning to Write Titles for Research Articles

Abstract

The article discusses the basic guidelines for writing titles of articles intended for publication in scientific journals. The relevance of the topic touched upon in this article is due to the fact that currently teachers are faced with the need to train master degree students at both linguistic and non-linguistic faculties to write scientific articles in English. The title is a very important part of the article, since it presents in a concise form the main information about the content of the publication. A well-formulated title can interest the reader and make him or her eager to read the article. On the contrary, titles which are too complicated to understand, cumbersome, and vague are unlikely to attract attention and arouse the interest of a potential reader. The aim of the study is to provide an overview of guidelines for writing titles that can be found in the English-language literature. The author also analyzes the typical mistakes that Russian-speaking authors make when writing titles of articles in English. Research methods include analysis, description, observation, comparison. The results of the study showed that the most common causes of errors in the formulation of titles are linguistic interference and ignorance of the peculiarities of the English-speaking communicative culture related to written communication in the scientific field. It is concluded that the course «Written academic communication in English» should be included in the Master course program, which will familiarize students with the main features of scientific articles in English and teach future authors to correctly formulate the titles of their publications.