• epistle
• february

We spend quite a while thinking of the titles for papers. When I’m working on a commission I will generally not commit to commissioning the paper until the authors and I agree on what the title should be. It’s silly, of course, because you don’t judge a book by its cover—and so you shouldn’t judge a paper by its title. But, actually, you do. People read our papers from, broadly speaking, two sources. Some people read by flicking through the paper journal after it lands on their doormat—or the table of contents lands in their inbox. Other people read specific articles when they find them in a search engine, either a generic search engine, or a medically engineered one like PubMed. So, what we call papers does …