TABLE OF CONTENTS According to Kerkut [150], for every person who reads the whole text of a scientific paper, five hundred read only the title. This statistic emphasizes the importance of the title. The title should give a terse description of the content, to help someone carefully scanning a journal contents page or a reference list decide whether to read the abstract or the paper itself. Ideally, it should also be catchy enough to attract the attention of a browser. Achieving a balance between these two aims is the key to writing an effective title. Kelley [147] mentions that he published an abstract with the title "A Decomposition of Compact Continua and Related Results on Fixed Sets under Continuous Mappings". After Paul Halmos suggested to him that it is not a good idea to put the whole paper into the title, he changed it to "Simple Links and Fixed Sets" for the published paper.
A note on the interpolation problem is too vague a title: what is the breakthrough heralded by A note, and which interpolation problem is under discussion? Similarly, Approximation by cubic splines is too vague (except for a thorough survey of the topic), since the approximation problem being addressed is not clear. Here are some examples of real titles, with my comments.
Computing the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of symmetric arrowhead matrices [D. P. O'Leary and G. W. Stewart. J. Comp. Phys., 90:497-505, 1990]. This is a lively and informative title. It is good...
