Writing informative titles for technical literature-an aid to efficient information retrieval

The advent of indexing schemes (many of them automated) that rely upon the words appearing in the title of a technical document has made the meticulous writing of titles more important than ever. Much of the effectiveness of such indexing - and thus the probability of efficient retrieval by readers later on-depends upon the care and the accuracy with which the author originally wrote his title. Described here are approaches to titling technical papers suggested by a technical library.