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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

The original title seems both linkbaity and misleading, so we changed it. If anyone can suggest a better title, please do.

Edit: Ok, since most people who commented don't agree that it was a bad title, we changed it back.

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Which? 'Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Research' seems better than 'Experimenter gender is a confounding factor in lab animal research', but which was the original?

Yeah, the 'male scent' (original) title is better. When I read 'Experimenter gender' I was expecting to read an article about some sort of gender-originated cognitive bias.

actually should be "experimenter sex". Gender is a social term.

The current changed title is overbroad, it's certainly not shown by this study that experimenter sex is an issue in all animal research. I would simply suggest the title of the paper itself: "Olfactory exposure to males, including men, causes stress and related analgesia in rodents". It's fairly straightforward, and not as jargon-filled as scientific titles go.

A suggestion: When you make such changes please write in your comment what the old and new titles were.

Well, right now, the title is wrong, because the female scent also affects the studies.

> Placing a woman’s T-shirt next to a man’s T-shirt negated the impact.

I think you should be more careful with titles such as this, especially with all the pro/anti-sexist shit going on currently.

That's actually why I called the original title misleading, and the linkbait (Male Scent!) seemed obvious to me as well. However, this was clearly a case where it was impossible to please everyone, so we retreated to the original.

It's often a little tricky to come up with accurate, neutral titles. It would be good if people would suggest them.

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