Colons in computer science paper titles (2018)

It must have taken superhuman willpower not to title this "Colons in computer-science paper titles: Threat, or menace?"

An English teacher that I had around ~20 years ago told the class that there were studies that considered the effect of a colon in the title alone and they suggested that having a colon in your title resulted in a better grade for your paper.

As a result, I generally take a second or two to write a title that works as phrases separated by a colon. I'll assume I've reaped some ever-so-mild benefit in my career. ;)

At least papers don't have subtitles (I think). When I have to record the title of a book, if there's a colon or a dash in it then I find it hard to know whether it's being used to separate the "title" from the "subtitle". Alternatively, if I know there's a subtitle then I don't know what to do when entering the data into a form that doesn't accept a subtitle. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtitle_(titling) for more information on this point of pedantry.

"XYZ considered harmful" is the other one I see in various papers and online posts. Boy does that one get mileage.

https://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

If only that were titled "'Considered Harmful': Considered Harmful".

based on "bad extrapolation of trends by eye": we should expect to hit saturation point with a proportion of 1.0 cs papers containing colons by 2180.

this leaves directions for future research: "Colons in paper-titles: are other characters even necessary?"

Right now, 6 of the 30 headlines on the HN front page contain colons.

Minor gripe: that error band needs some tweaking. You can't have negative proportions.

A lot of the most recent titles featuring colons aren't the type "Proposition: Question?". Most of the papers I read with colons in the title are similar to "Project Name: Project Description"

Next time I am going to write algorithm64() instead of quicksort()

Somebody ought to do a breakdown by subfield.