For every person who reads the whole of a scientific paper, about 500 read only the title (Kerkut 1983). One way to improve this statistic could be to make the title declarative by including what the paper says, not just what it covers.

Whenever possible, use a declarative rather than a neutral title

This title is neutral:

John Vane, in his classic paper published in Nature in 1971, put it more expressively:

(In 1988, Vane was awarded a Nobel Prize in acknowledgment of his discovery. Vane told us how aspirin relieves pain.)

The following declarative title is taken from the biological sciences (Marvin 1964):

Goodman et al. (2001) recommended that the study design also be included in the title, as follows (Lee et al 1995):

However, the following formulation is notrecommended (Quesada et al 1995):

Do the authors really mean to imply that the issue is settled once and for all? Your own present work should be referred to in the past tense:

This way of using a verb in a title makes it into a sentence. It is stronger than using a phrase, some say too strong.