In the Shakespeare play As You Like It main character Rosalind reads the epilogue, from which we cite:

If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue;

The Dutch translation of the saying “Good wine needs no bush” is quite confusing as “bush” is translated by “krans”  which – translated back in English – means a wreath of laurel, that is some kind of prize. This is the wrong interpretation. In the 16th century (English) inns that were serving wine had to hang outside a bush of ivy. Good wine needs no bush, means that inns that would present excellent wine to their customers did not need to advertise their product by hanging a bush of ivy outside. Customers would come anyway.

Nowadays marketing has become a fact of life. Try to get customers, buyers or readers. Even if under false pretexts, or by plain lying – as in commercials- as long as you catch the attention you are doing well.

Journal titles
Scientists need citations for their papers. Disregarding the phenomenon of citation copying (that is citing a paper because somebody else cites it, without ever looking at the paper yourself) colleagues have at least to look at the title of the paper before they decide to cite it. If the content of your paper is a dull, solid investigation and your title announces this heavy reading, it is clear you will not reach your citation target, as your department head will tell you in your evaluation interview. So to survive – and to impress editors and reviewers of high-impact journals,  you will have to hype up your title. And embellish your abstract. And perhaps deliberately confuse the reader about the content. One particular abuse I want to discuss in the rest of this post.

Experiment or theory?
In physics the classification of the type of work follows three categories: (i)  experiment, (ii) theory, and (iii) computer simulation. All three efforts are important, but experiment is always leading as physics is about “out there”  and physics is not mathematics. This classification goes very deep in physics and has lots of social repercussions. In other natural sciences, like chemistry and biology, the vast majority is doing experiments.

Experimental results get more credit
I notice that especially in physics colleagues who carry out theory or numerical simulations, often want to hide that fact from their readers. So they use the language of experiments, in the hope that their work will be interpreted by the superficial reader as being the report of an experiment. The title will contain words like  “Observation of the break-down of … ”  or “Discovery of strong enhancements …”. In the abstract you will read that “We found that this behavior was particularly important at low temperature”  Or “Our observed errors …” In this way they want to give the impression that they have performed experiments. Readers and editors fall in this trap. But this is very bad for experimentalists who after careful experiments want to report  new experimental results and are confronted with editors and reviewers telling them that their observation is not new and far less exciting than the previous reported “observation”.

Also in the popular media predictions by theories are confused with real experimental observations. Again confusion intended.

Other type of misleading titles occur. Like getting buzz words in your title, even if they are unrelated to the content of the manuscript

To authors
Make immediately clear in your title whether your papers is about experiment, theory or simulation. Do not mislead your readers, editors and reviewers.

To referees and editors
Detect immediately these misleading  titles and abstracts and reject immediately.

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