On Paper Titles

How do you take a twenty page research paper and condense its essence into a few words? A couple of title don'ts with some (made up) examples.

    * Starting a title with "On", "Towards", "New" or "Improved" or ending with "?"

          You are announcing that you have failed to solve the problem you really care about and this is the best you can do. Nobody would title a paper proving P?NP "On an Open Problem of Cook".

    * "Breaking the  Barrier"

          Either it wasn't a barrier after all or you cheated and changed the model.

    * Cutesy Titles

          "A slice of p" 

    * Ending with a Roman Numeral

          "Pig Complexity I". Does the world need more than one paper on pig complexity?

    * Out of Context Titles

          "Three rounds suffice" 

    * Technical Terms

          Don't use highly technical terms or complexity classes in the title. Any computer scientist should at least understand the words in the title. 

    * Formal Statement of Result

          "A O(n3/2log n log log n/log* n)-time one-sided randomized algorithm giving a O(n1/3/(log n)4/3) approximation to 12-sided 3-way 20-dimensional hypergraph coloring." 

    * Long Titles

          Ditto. 

What makes a good title? Short and to the point. Some of several titles I liked from the last FOCS: "Cryptography from Anonymity", "Fault-Tolerant Distributed Computing in Full-Information Networks", "Planar Point Location in Sublogarithmic Time". Enough to give you the idea of the paper and the desire to read more.

I went through my bibtex file trying to find great papers with lousy titles. Except for a few "On"s (On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem), great papers seem to have at least reasonable titles. A lesson for all of us paper titlers.
