Designing the Perfect Title for Your Thesis or Dissertation
Visibility and accessibility are key issues to keep in mind when you are designing a title for your thesis or dissertation. Most researchers will find your work, or not, via the digital catalogues of university libraries or other online searches. An effective title must therefore appear when potential readers type in keywords geared at discovering information on the topic of your research, and that title must also inspire interest immediately and seem significant enough that those readers will click on it to learn more by reading your abstract or perhaps your table of contents.
A title that clearly and thoroughly encapsulates the argument of your thesis or dissertation based on exactly what your research reveals can be most effective for attracting readers. Some universities and departments will also want thesis titles to indicate or allude to the methodology used, and while this may prove a little cumbersome, it can be tucked into a subtitle, and some readers will be interested in your methods as well. The language should be concise because search engines will often cut long titles short, so a wise policy is to begin with the information that describes the most important aspect or focus of your argument or findings and then to keep your title as brief as possible.
The words you use in your title should be precise in relation to your work. Readers need to find your thesis or dissertation via those words, and they also need to recognise through your title that your research is relevant to their interests and requirements. Specialised and theoretical terminology may be appropriate, but only if it is current, enduring and likely to be used by the readers you are hoping to attract. Obscure, archaic or ambiguous language, although rather popular in the humanities for its implications and connotations, can render your writing invisible to readers simply because they are highly unlikely to type in the terms as you have used them, and when your title is found, such terms may prove confusing or misleading.
An effective title should also be striking and memorable. Even when readers are intrigued enough by your title to download or otherwise locate your thesis or dissertation, they will still need to remember your work in order to read and cite it in their own writing weeks, months or even years after initially discovering it. A striking title that accurately describes the content of your thesis and is highly memorable can be found again online, in an extensive pdf collection, in a library catalogue or on a bookshelf much more easily than one that is mundane and imprecise.
Before finalising your title, type the whole of it (in double quotation marks) into search engines such as Google Books. Ideally, you will find nothing else out there with the exact same title, but if your title does turn up, consider rewording it a little. You can also search for a few of the most distinctive words in your title, but in that case an absence of matches is not as good as a modest number of matches. You should ensure that the main words in your title are more often than not used with the meanings you intend and that they generally appear in association with your topic or subject matter. If so, it is more likely that readers will find your thesis or dissertation through those words, and that your writing will be in relevant company in search results.
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