The title page: every field journals check, including character limits.

A title page for journal submission carries six things: the full article title, a short title or running head, every author's name and affiliation in the agreed order, one designated corresponding author with contact details, the manuscript's word and figure counts, and any funding or disclaimer lines the journal wants stated up front. The ICMJE recommendations, which most biomedical journals follow, spell out this list almost field for field. Two of those fields come with hard caps that the submission system enforces: the title and the short title.

How long can a journal article title be?

Journals cap the title at a character count, and the cap is a rule, not advice. PLOS ONE states it in one line: "Full title must not exceed 250 characters."

A character limit behaves differently from a word limit. Every letter, space, colon, and parenthesis counts, so a title that reads as a modest eighteen words can still blow past the cap once you add a subtitle, a species name in parentheses, and a study design tag like "a randomized controlled trial." Paste your draft title into a character counter and count everything, spaces included. If the journal counts more generously than that, you land under the limit either way.

Go over the cap and you find out inside the submission form, which is the worst place to rewrite a title. Cuts made there tend to be clumsy: a dropped study design tag that the journal actually wanted, or an abbreviation that violates a different rule. Trim at your desk instead. Subtitles, location qualifiers, and redundant framing phrases such as "a study of" usually go first.

What is a running head or short title?

A running head, also called a short title, is a compressed version of your title that the journal prints at the top of published pages and uses in editorial correspondence. It gets its own field in the submission form and its own cap. PLOS ONE again: "Short title must not exceed 100 characters."

Other outlets set the bar lower. APA Style limits the running head to 50 characters, counted with spaces and punctuation, and asks for it in capital letters. APA also tells authors to avoid abbreviations inside it, though an ampersand may stand in for "and."

Do not build the short title by chopping the full title mid-phrase. Keep the terms a reader would scan for, usually the intervention or exposure and the population, and let the rest go. "Metformin and cognitive decline in type 2 diabetes" works as a running head. "A prospective multicenter cohort study of the association between" does not, and it is exactly what blind truncation produces.

Who goes on the title page, and in what order?

Every author, listed in the final agreed order, each name tied to an affiliation, and one author marked as corresponding with a working email address. The order on the title page is the order of record. It is what the journal publishes and what databases index.

The ICMJE recommendations ask for the department and institution where the work was done, each author's highest academic degrees where the journal uses them, and the corresponding author's telephone number and email. They also encourage listing each author's ORCID iD, and a growing number of journals have moved that from encouraged to required. If a co-author does not have one yet, an ORCID iD takes minutes to set up and saves a round trip with the editorial office later.

Settle authorship order before anyone types this page. The title page is where private agreements become the public record, and changing the order after submission requires a signed explanation at most journals. Ten minutes of conversation now is cheaper.

Affiliations follow a numbering convention: a superscript number after each name points to the matching institution line below. If an author has moved since the work was done, list the institution where the work happened and add a "current address" line.

What word counts and figure counts do journals ask for?

Many journals want the manuscript's own numbers declared on the title page or typed into the submission system: a word count for the text alone, plus the number of figures and tables. The ICMJE recommendations define the word count as the text excluding the abstract, acknowledgments, tables, figure legends, and references, and note that some submission systems require the figure and table counts before you can upload the files.

The abstract carries a separate limit with its own field, and those caps vary more between journals than most authors expect. Report each count against the journal's definition rather than whatever your word processor shows for the whole document. A count that includes references can overstate the text by thousands of words and make a compliant paper look over length.

Does the title page go in a separate file or on page one?

The journal's review model decides. Double-anonymized review means a separate title page file, because the manuscript file goes to reviewers and must carry nothing that identifies the authors. Journals with single-anonymized or open review commonly keep the title page as the first page of the manuscript. The guide for authors states which format applies, usually under "manuscript organization" or "blinding."

The title page also has to agree with everything around it. The title you type into the submission system, the one on the title page, and the one in your cover letter should match character for character, and the author list should match the names entered in the system. Editorial offices check these against each other, and a mismatch is one of the administrative returns that delays a paper without rejecting it. Checking the manuscript against the journal's stated limits before you upload is the kind of mechanical pass a Waraq review runs for you, title and short title caps included.

Built from the journal's own list, the title page is ten minutes of work. Built from memory, it is the page most likely to bounce your submission back before an editor reads a word. Work through it alongside the full submission checklist, field by field, with the guide for authors open in the next tab.