one of my Science Opinions is that the titles of papers and grants should be completely dry and boring and direct so I am amused to learn that in one analysis, very funny & jokey titles (2SD > M) got cited *less* than average journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I have absolutely no regrets about this incredible Lord of the Rings pun that my grad advisor came up with for our paper on whether infants bind topology (rings vs. solids) to object representations

I've personally had articles that received more attention with a clever title. I think true cleverness is key though, and most "funny" titles aren't actually clever.

oh wow how are we the same on another thing that's so unpopular and right yet again?!! 😂

I also hate titles with colons in them and avoid them like the plague as an author. I would love to see a causal estimate for how much adding a colon reduces article impact

Agree. Here's my go to example, the journal Animal Behaviour, doing it right.

See also stupid names for genes/mutations I blame the drosophila crowd and their hedgehogs Signed: Grumpy of Mt Roskill

But I am so proud of my one because the joke works so well with the message of the paper 😭

I thought I disagreed and could point to my own papers to prove why… but like my only clever paper title is “Porndemic?” which was a longitudinal survey study of porn use from August 2019 to October 2020 and was actually more descriptive than clever

"professor, this is more than 2 standard deviations more humorous than the mean! We can't call it that!" Is now the running comedy skit in my head.

Many of the best paper titles are just summaries of the main result.