Timeline for When is it appropriate to entitle a paper "A note on..." or "On the ..."? [closed]
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28 events
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| May 14, 2019 at 13:22 | comment | added | Andreas Blass | @DonuArapura concerning you comment that your first paper's title began with "a note on": My first three papers' titles began with "On" and the fourth with "A note on". (And 18 more of my papers have such titles.) | |
| May 7, 2017 at 0:26 | review | Reopen votes | |||
| May 7, 2017 at 1:34 | |||||
| Mar 21, 2015 at 13:45 | history | edited | user9072 |
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| Nov 19, 2011 at 6:37 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| Nov 17, 2011 at 23:04 | history | closed |
user6976 Felipe Voloch Andrés E. Caicedo Daniel Moskovich Suvrit |
not a real question | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 22:51 | answer | added | Michael Renardy | timeline score: 6 | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 20:57 | vote | accept | Johan Öinert | ||
| Nov 17, 2011 at 9:48 | answer | added | Willie Wong | timeline score: 9 | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 7:33 | answer | added | Igor Pak | timeline score: 27 | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 6:01 | answer | added | Gerhard Paseman | timeline score: 2 | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 5:19 | comment | added | Noam D. Elkies | @Timothy Chow: another example of a title that needs the initial "On": Dalzell, D.P.: On $22/7$, J. LMS 19 (1944) 133–134. [Thanks to M.Renardy's answer mathoverflow.net/questions/67384/… to my MO query.] | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 4:36 | comment | added | François G. Dorais | An extreme case along these lines is: 'Quelques modestes remarques à propos d'une conséquence inattendue d'un résultat surprenant de Monsieur Frank Olaf Wagner' by Bruno Poizat. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 4:14 | comment | added | Alicia Garcia-Raboso | @Barry: You also forgot Grothendieck's "On certain aspects of homological algebra". | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 4:12 | comment | added | Yemon Choi | I must confess to using a title of the form "On slithy toves", but only because the more accurate "The only slithy toves are the ones you'd expect" would have been longer and sounded too flippant | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 3:59 | comment | added | François G. Dorais | Interesting. I just wrote a paper titled 'A note on ...' It was kind of a pun since some of the maine references were titled in a similarly creative way... I blame peer pressure! | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 3:49 | comment | added | JRN | I would start the title of a paper with "On [something]" if the [something] is already known. For example, a paper introducing generalized choral sequences would be titled "Generalized Choral Sequences" but a paper on some of its properties would be titled "On Generalized Choral Sequences." | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 3:29 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | Regarding question 4, I would advise never starting a paper with the word "On." Just omit the word entirely and the title will be fine, and probably better, without it. (The only exception I can think of is D. E. Evans's paper "On $\cal O_n$.") | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 2:07 | comment | added | fedja | I tend to entitle my papers "(a note/remark) on (whatever problem)" when I cannot really solve the problem but think that what I can say is directly related to it and interesting enough to be published. A typical example is "A remark on the Mahler conjecture: local minimality of the unit cube ". The title says it all: we could not prove the actual conjecture but we still did something not completely trivial, which somewhat justified our going public with it. The length of the paper has nothing whatsoever to do with my choice of such titles. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 2:05 | comment | added | Barry Cipra | Oh, I forgot: "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"... | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 2:00 | comment | added | Michal Kotowski | IMHO titles like "A note on ..." should be avoided, unless the title is long enough to make completely unambiguous what specific problem (conjecture etc.) is the topic of the paper. I guess everybody would be hard pressed to say what e.g. "A note on a problem of Erdos" is really about. One should aim to make the title as informative as possible. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 1:59 | comment | added | Barry Cipra | Let's not forget, Charles Darwin titled his most famous book "On the Origin of Species." If you prefer something a little more mathematical, D'Arcy Thompson wrote a book called "On Growth and Form." | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 1:18 | comment | added | Donu Arapura | More seriously, I wouldn't agonize over this too much. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 1:14 | comment | added | Donu Arapura | Damn it, if I'd only known! My first paper was entitled a "A note on...". But there was no internet back then... | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 1:00 | comment | added | user9072 | @David: I would say it implies that the author(s) thought it was not 'very important', which is something different entirely. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 0:50 | comment | added | David Roberts♦ | I agree with Henry - 'A note on ....' sort of implies that the content of the paper is not very important. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 0:49 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | "A note" does suggest it is short (in principle you could have a 50 page note, but that would be an eccentric title). People may assume a note is not very important, so I'd hesitate to use that title unless either experts will consider the paper obviously important or you have other, better papers and don't care if this one sounds less important. It doesn't suggest a survey paper to me. Overall, I'd use "A note on..." or "On the..." only if that is the clearest title you can think of (and I think it often won't be). | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 0:39 | comment | added | Andy Putman | I don't think there are any hard and fast rules on paper titles. Just try to make them specific enough that readers can guess the content. | |
| Nov 17, 2011 at 0:00 | history | asked | Johan Öinert | CC BY-SA 3.0 |