[Taxacom] Ornamental flourishes

[Neal Evenhuis]

.. but to be fair -- those conclusions were based on a psychology audience .... where "Psychologist Comedian" is an oxymoron.

Biologists are definitely more fun and receptive to humor (as Mike Ivie has noted in his posting after Geoff's).

News media do alliteration and puns all the time. I think a survey of THAT readership needs to be done (could do for online versions) to see if readers like the more humorous titles versus the more somber (I prefer that to "sober").

-Neal

On 5/22/12 2:02 PM, "Geoffrey Read" <gread at actrix.gen.nz<mailto:gread at actrix.gen.nz>> scribbled the following tidbit:

Lena to my knowledge has to date worked with very sober titles, so I shall
be interested in this new departure. :)

There is a bit of investigation on this topic for pyschology papers
[http://jis.sagepub.com/content/34/5/680], and it was found that "articles
with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received
fewer citations".  Bad news for punsters.


Geoff


On Tue, May 22, 2012 2:21 pm, Elena Kupriyanova wrote:
Geoff,

Why not? We (mostly) have fun doing our research, why don't we reflect in
in our paper's title
(A confession - I am guilty as charged because I currently work on two
manuscripts with embellished titles)
Lena

-----Original Message-----
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
[mailto:taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Geoff Read
Sent: Tuesday, 22 May 2012 12:00 PM
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu<mailto:taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Subject: [Taxacom] Ornamental flourishes

Do taxacomers approve of paper titles which preface the nitty-gritty of
the descriptive part with an adaption of a cliche phrase such as those
below?



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