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Your research paper or thesis is almost done – you just need a compelling title for it? Then you should definitely read on, because here you’ll get 7 tips on how to choose a title for a research paper and make the title of your term paper an irresistibly attractive magnet.

The title will burn itself into the mind of your professor and will give them no choice but to put your paper on top of their list.

#1 Create a draft of your title early on

Nailing down an unchanging title at the beginning of your paper journey makes no sense. Spend a few minutes formulating a halfway decent title that you can present to your professor in the first meeting or even in the first e-mail.

Your title doesn’t have to do be perfect. But a simple rule for a first draft of your title is the following:

Put the most important concepts of your paper in your title.

As a first step, write a list of the most important concepts of your paper and rank them. The best way to explain this technique is to use an example. For my fictitious paper I choose the concepts:

Digital Nomadism – Corporate Work – Employer Branding.

Okay… defining these key concepts will not only help you formulate your title. They are also the central keywords for your literature search and the structure of your background section.

Before you can define your key concepts, you should of course have thought about a topic for your term paper. If you need some inspiration for that, check out my article on how to find a research topic.

But now back to how to choose a title for a research paper. From the 3 key concepts, you now form a sentence that brings the words in a reasonably logical context. For example like this:

Digital Nomad Corporate Work as an Employer Branding Tool

Boom – the draft is done. That wasn’t all that difficult. Of course, it is not yet a perfect title. But we will work on that. However, to give your supervisor a clear idea of your work, this title draft is great.

Besides, we don’t want to reveal the perfectly painted final title yet. It should only be emblazoned on the cover page of your term paper when you hand it in and make your supervisor’s shoes come off.

If you reveal your final title only towards the end, then you will also show that you have put effort into revising and perfecting your research paper.

#2 Divide your title with a colon

Now we come to the linguistic nuances and tips on how to make a lasting impression with the title of your paper. You know all those sayings and wisdoms: First impressions count and so on…. and you know what? It’s true.

If your title triggers curiosity, polarizes, or stirs up expectations, then the reader (in most cases, your professor) will approach the matter with a completely different default setting (priming).

With an uninspired, boring title, that person will decide in the first few seconds that your work has lost its chance for an outstanding grade.

With an exceptional title, however, s/he will inwardly think “wow, the bar is set. I wonder if this work can meet my expectations?” And the foundation for your A-type grade is laid. Now all that’s left is for the rest of your work to deliver. But if you have seen all my other tutorials, that shouldn’t be a problem for you.

The next hack on how to choose a title for a research paper is the separation by a colon. This way you split your title into two parts and double your design possibilities. You can still name the most important terms in a reasonable way – and additionally throw in an existing or polarizing statement.

Let’s try the whole thing with my example:

Corporate Nomadism: Digital Nomad Work as an Employer Branding Tool

These two parts now allowed me to accommodate an additional notion (corporate nomadism), which makes the title of the paper even more interesting, because that terminology is not well-established and rather thought-provoking.

This title would be quite acceptable for a research paper. But it can be even better.

#3 Raise expectations with a counterintuitive statement

The idea of “corporate nomadism” is counterintuitive. Why? Because digital nomads hate corporations and have build a whole movement to escape the 9-to-5. Therefore, conflating the two worlds is a bit polarizing.

The thought-provoking statement should trigger the following thoughts in your professors’s mind: “Wait a minute, actually this is different…. how can that be!” In your paper, you will then enlighten him or her with the help of your unique argument.

A title that is really clear to everyone creates an effect you want to avoid: pure boredom. Is your title something like this:

Remote Work as a Challenge for Corporate Cultures

That’s… OK but to be honest, quite boring. It would have been an exciting title in 2015 maybe.

Anyway, if your key concepts are inherently not that exciting like business process management and automated workflows, then you can use another technique.

#4 Use magic words

What’s that supposed to be? Has he gone completely crazy?

No. Magic words are the missing icing on the cake when it comes to how to choose a title for a research paper.

Magic words aren’t meant to make you drift into fiction or make your title seem ridiculous. Rather, you can use them to make your title more interesting and striking – the way a title should be.

I thought for a while about how to incorporate a magic word into my example – and came to the following conclusion:

Corporate Nomadism: Digital Nomad Work as Disruptive Employer Branding Signals

My magic word (disruptive) polarizes, makes a statement, sounds good and thus rounds out the title in a worthy way. I replaced “Tools” with “Signals” as this hints to an interesting theoretical angle (Signaling Theory) that I am trying to pursue in my paper.

What do you think?

I am satisfied.

#5 Create clarity by using nouns

I have unintentionally used this tip in most of the example formulations. To help you understand what I mean, I’ll give you a negative example on how to choose a title for a research paper.

Digital Nomads working as Corporate Employees: How Companies are Improving their Employer Branding by Signaling Flexible Work Arrangements.

Haha. I guess I went a little overboard on that one. That title sounds really crappy for a change.

But it makes you realize what I mean by using nouns. Instead of using verbs (here: working, improve, signaling), you limit yourself exclusively to nouns. The meaning of both titles is essentially the same. But this one is not only longer but also not very compelling.

If we compare this title with the previous example, one thing becomes clear:

“Nouns, we need nouns.”

#6 Don’t commit until the end

To close the loop completely, let’s go back to the beginning. In the first tip we agreed to write a draft for your title first. Based on the examples, you have now seen how many different iterations the title of a paper can go through.

You can do the same. Do not decide on a title until your paper is finished. Your title should appropriately reflect the contents and core idea of your paper. In the writing process, a paper can quickly develop in a different direction, which requires you to adjust the title.

Therefore, it is not necessary that your title is perfect at the beginning. But be careful: Sometimes the administrative staff that oversees the submissions of theses might not like a change of the title as they have already put it in the submission systems. Give them a heads up in case you made changes without their knowledge.

#7 Optimize your title for (scholarly) search engines

This final tip is a bit advanced but it might still be helpful for you. Even some of the most accomplished researchers do not pay attention to this and miss out on a lot of potential of their papers.

For a scientific publication to thrive, its discoverability is key. And in this day and age, papers are discovered through search engines and databases such as Google Scholar, Scopus or the Web of Science. These platforms work with keywords and search algorithms.

This means that you can optimize your title for keywords. If you do, more people will discover the paper in case it is indexed in one of those databases.

And even if you think: “Well, I am just a student who needs to pass this class with a term paper…”, I can tell you that the closer you can get to the real practice of research and publishing, the more impressed your professor will be.

So, let us quickly analyze the search-optimization of our example.

Corporate Nomadism: Digital Nomad Work as Disruptive Employer Branding Signals

Even though I wanted to include the polarizing term “Corporate Nomadism”, I still kept “digital nomad” in there. This is because nobody will search for “corporate nomadism”, but many will search for “digital nomad”.

The second keyword is “Employer Branding”, which is also fully included in the title.

Lastly, the keyword about the theory (“Signals”) could be improved. Researchers might search for “signaling theory”. So one could change the title to something like this:

Digital Nomad Work for Employer Branding: A Signaling Theory Perspective

However, I still prefer the first version. Even though this one would be perfectly optimized for keywords.

What I then do is to make sure that the keyword “Signaling Theory” is included in the abstract of the paper. This is because the abstract is also indexed on those databases alongside the title.

What is the difference between a master’s thesis and a PhD thesis?

Essentially, both are scientific, but there are some important nuances you should know in order to get the best possible results for each type of thesis.

In this article, I will show you the 5 most important differences that you must pay attention to when writing your master’s or phd thesis.

By knowing these, you will not be surprised by the requirements of professors and examination offices, but will be perfectly prepared.

#1 Scope

The most obvious difference lies in the scope of the work. On average, a Master’s thesis is expected to have 60 to 150 pages of text, excluding bibliography and appendix.

A PhD thesis typically ranges from 200 to 400 pages. However, there are also outliers that lie outside of this spectrum. It all depends on the discipline you are in and the requirements of your research institution.

What is certain is that a PhD thesis should be more comprehensive than a Master’s thesis.

#2 Time spent

The second major difference lies in the temporal dimension.

Master’s Thesis

For a Master’s thesis, you usually have 3 to 6 months from the time of registering your topic.

If you’re worried that this time isn’t enough, you can also game thy system a little. In most cases, you have to write an extended abstract before registering your thesis. This is a 3-5 page summary of your research project. There is usually no deadline for submitting an exposé.

Consequently, if you want to maximize the time you have available for writing your thesis, you can already use the unlimited time you have for the extended abstract to work on your thesis.

In my view, registering your thesis is more of a bureaucratic formality. So why not start researching interview partners or reading more into the theory than necessary for the extended abstract before your timer counts?

Apart from that, you shouldn’t stress too much about time. If your priorities are clearly focused on your thesis and you divide your work into smart work packages, the time you have is completely sufficient.

It’s just part of the examination – are you capable of creating such a work within a defined period of time?

PhD Thesis

Writing a PhD thesis usually takes 3 to 5 years. It took me 4 and a half years to complete mine.

How long it takes you to write a PhD thesis depends on a lot of factors:

• The requirements of your supervisor(s)
• Whether you are part of a graduate school or some other fast track
• How you fund yourself
• Your teaching load
• The administrative work that is expected of you
• Whether your thesis is based on publications or a monography (more on this in a minute)

Here, I can give you the same advice as before. Do not stress out about the time.

Who cares if it takes you 4 years or 5 years. If you want to pursue and academic career, you can game the system here a little bit, too.

In academia, the clock starts ticking the moment you graduate from your PhD. Nobody care how long it takes you to finish your PhD but everybody cares about what you do in the time after that.

The best strategy here is to write up the thesis with a little effort as possible and put as much effort as possible into publishing papers.

It does not matter whether they are part of the story of your PhD thesis or not. The only thing that matters is having a lot of papers in your pipeline immediately after you graduate.

If you do your PhD to get two letters in front of your name and pursue a career in industry, then your strategy should be to write up your thesis as fast as possible. Let me know in the comments if you are interested in how I would do this.

#3 Originality

Originality can mean two things.

First, it can mean that you are pursuing a really unique idea. This could be bringing together different (theoretical) perspectives on an old topic or investigating an entirely new topic.

Second, originality can also mean to do “original” research. This means collecting unique empirical data that no one else has collected. In a master’s thesis, collecting original data is great, but it is not a must. For example, a great literature review could also make a great master’s thesis.

But for a PhD thesis it is almost inevitable that you collect or at least analyze a unique dataset. A PhD is only awarded if you can show that you have investigated a specific topic in more detail than anyone ever before.

Even if you do a PhD in let’s say English literature. You might not collect unique data, but you must deal with a specific question in so much detail that you can contribute to the current state of knowledge in your discipline.

#4 Theoretical Contribution

What often leads to question marks in the eyes of students is the role of theory within a thesis. Therefore, I would like to address this once again. Just because a PhD thesis requires added theoretical value doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use theory in your master’s thesis.

If you’re not clear on the difference between literature and theory, or you’ve previously assumed that the two are the same thing, watch a couple of more videos on my channel about what a theory is in social sciences. It’s really important to understand this difference. For other disciplines outside of the social sciences, it is not the quality of the theory but the degree of innovation you can achieve with your thesis.

In a master’s thesis, you’re not expected to independently develop or extend a theory. But anything you can contribute in this direction is very good! Approaches of new theory are for example inductively formed categories in a thematic analysis or the statistical verification of a theoretical relationship in a model.

For literature-based work, which can also constitute a thesis, the laws are always a little different, that’s clear. Here, it is most important that you not only summarize the literature descriptively, but that you analytically identify and reflect on patterns, themes, and contradictions. In the social sciences, you can also generate a theoretical contribution from synthesizing literature. Outside of the social sciences, a similar thing is possible, for example, with a meta analysis.

A good decision here would be to follow an established approach and do a systematic, narrative, or meta review. This way, you have a clear blueprint for your thesis and don’t have to come up with a structure for your literature review yourself.

#5 Assessment Criteria

Both master’s and PhD theses are scientific works. If, for example, you quote incorrectly or your illustrations are full of pixels, then this is not good in either case. In this respect, no differences can be made here.

Criteria for a Master’s Thesis

Of course, the bar for master’s theses is not so high in terms of the added value of the work for the general research landscape. If you write a master’s thesis that is formally and methodologically flawless, then you can’t really fail.

But you can earn a lot of goodwill by exceeding expectations. After all, no one says, “Oh, but 12 interviews are too much for a master’s thesis. That’s not good.” So if you really want to get the top grade, try to overdeliver in every category of a scientific study.

If you make the mistake of limiting yourself by the demands of a master’s thesis, then that would be a pity. At the same time, of course, there is no pressure at all to do that – but if you were to ask me, “What do I have to do to get the best grade?” – then overdelivering would be my answer. Surprise your referees by doing more than they are used to. This increases the chance that they will give you a better grade than usual.

Criteria for a PhD Thesis

For a PhD thesis, I can only give you the tip to team up with an early career researcher such a postdoctoral researcher or an assistant professor as your supervisors. This group of academics, to which I also belong, relies heavily on generating a high research output. If your PhD thesis can help with that and it answers a relevant research question or provides valuable data for that person’s research, then it will be reflected in your grade.

The more research output you can generate from the work on your PhD thesis, the better your grade will turn out to be.