Field of Science

Naked truth about sex, gardening, religion, and politics in American government

In this day of binging and googling, buzzwords in a title can greatly affect the number of hits upon your blog or published article, but who would stoop to such a low and deceptive device? Since botany is in one of the little traveled back waters of biology, and most of biology isn’t trendy enough to matter to the media, it would appear that the Phactor has never used one of these academically trendy buzz words in any title of any published article. He did publish ‘the best pun ever used as a title” (according to one reviewer) and it attracted a great deal of attention to a small, but quite clever, bit of research, so buzzwords appears to work, but by now you should have realized that you are a data point in an experiment. We’ll report back to see if the traffic on this article is affected by the gratuitous use of buzzwords in the title. Which buzz word do you think will have the greatest impact? Take the poll; you're part of the experiment anyways.

1 comment:

Phil said...

The humourist Alan Coren had an interesting take on buzz words in book titles. Observing that books about cats, golf and the Third Reich often topped the bestseller lists, he published a book of humourous stories called Golfing for Cats, with a large swastika on the cover, that I think did rather well. I notice that it's still listed on Amazon, though now without an image of the cover.