9 Title and subtitle
The title and, optionally, the subtitle of an article are entered in the metadata title and subtitle fields:
title: The Solution to the Problem that Plagued Everyone
subtitle: A Brand New DiscoveryTitles of the form “Time Travel: a Quantum Relativity Puzzle” should be split into title and subtitle. Exceptions are cases where splitting wouldn’t make sense, e.g. “Pleasure: friend or foe?”.
If a title or subtitle contains colons or quotation marks, it should be either wrapped within quotation marks or entered as a text block. See Section 8.2.1.
The title and subtitle fields should not contain explicit linebreaks. (See Section 8.5 on what explicit linebreaks are.) Not only it’s best to let the reader’s device set the linebreaks in ‘fluid’ outputs (HTML, EPUB), but these fields are also used for the table of contents and to send information to a bibliographic database. They should thus be free of unnecessary formatting.
Sometimes, however, you need alternative forms of the title:
- a short title to be used in page headers and/or the table of contents.
- a title with explicit line breaks, when the title is long and default line breaks don’t look good in PDF output.
For these, your journal’s template should provide extra title fields. Dialectica, for instance, uses shorttitle if a shorter version is needed for page headers and the table of contents, title-latex if we need specific linebreaks on the article’s first page in PDF output, and title-cover if we need different linebreaks on the offprint cover than on the article’s first page.
Your journal’s template may also have extra fields to handle how titles and subtitles appear in the table of contents. For instance, Dialectica shows both title and subtitle in the table of contents, separated by a colon. As the colon isn’t appropriate when the title ends with a question mark or other punctuation, the template provides a subtitleseparator field that can be used to replace the colon with a space.
For details see your journal template’s guidelines.