Title Page (Research Paper)

The title page is the first thing an editor, reviewer, or reader encounters, and it is also one of the most format-sensitive parts of a manuscript: journals that are otherwise flexible about prose style are frequently strict about title-page structure, because it is the page indexing systems, editorial-office staff, and (for blinded review) reviewers all rely on to identify a submission correctly.

Elements that recur across style guides and journals

No single title-page format is universal, but the following elements appear, in some combination, across nearly every academic style guide (APA, and most journal-specific author instructions derived loosely from ICMJE recommendations):

• Title. Concise, specific, and searchable — most guidance discourages abbreviations in the title itself, since it is what gets indexed and displayed in search results and citation databases.
• Author names and affiliations. Full author byline in the agreed authorship order, with each author’s institutional affiliation (department and institution, sometimes down to city/country) linked to their name, typically by superscript numbers or symbols when authors have different affiliations.
• Corresponding-author contact information. The designated corresponding author’s email (and sometimes postal address/phone) so the editorial office and readers know who to contact about the paper after publication. Journals vary on whether this sits directly under the byline or inside a separate author note/footnote block. See CASRAI’s corresponding author entry.
• Running head / running title. A short, abbreviated version of the title that prints in the page header (or footer) throughout the document, historically for print-production purposes and still required by many journals and by APA style. Character limits are common (APA caps its running head at 50 characters including spaces; individual journals set their own, often different, limits for a running title).
• Funding and conflict-of-interest disclosures. Many journals require a funding-source statement and a conflict-of-interest (or “competing interests”) disclosure at submission — sometimes on the title page itself, sometimes in a separate disclosure section immediately following it. See CASRAI’s guide on conflict-of-interest disclosure statement templates for what that statement typically needs to say.
• Word count. Some journals require a stated word count (of the abstract, the main text, or both) on the title page, used editorially to check the submission against that journal’s length limits before it goes to review.
• Author note (APA-style manuscripts specifically). Under APA 7th edition, professional/journal manuscripts include an author note in the bottom half of the title page covering ORCID iD, any change in author affiliation since the study was conducted, acknowledgments, and corresponding-author contact details. APA student papers, by contrast, use a simplified title page with no running head and no author note unless an instructor specifically requests them.

Why the format varies instead of being standardized

A title page is not itself a citation-format element the way an in-text citation or reference-list entry is — it is a submission-formatting requirement, and submission formatting is set by whoever is receiving the manuscript. That means two things can both be true and not contradict each other: APA’s Publication Manual specifies one full title-page layout, and a given psychology journal’s own instructions to authors can specify a different one (a different running-head character limit, a required word count APA doesn’t mandate, disclosure placement APA doesn’t address at all). Where the two disagree, authors follow the target journal’s instructions, not the general style manual, because the journal’s requirements are what the editorial office actually checks a submission against. The same pattern holds across other style guides and disciplines — a biomedical journal’s title-page requirements are shaped more by ICMJE-derived norms (corresponding-author contact, disclosures, word count) than by any single named style manual.

Practical implication for authors

Because of that variation, the reliable process is: check the target journal’s “Instructions for Authors” (or “Author Guidelines”) page first for its specific title-page requirements, and use a general style guide (APA, or a discipline-specific manual) only to fill in anything the journal’s own instructions leave unspecified. Submitting with the wrong journal’s format is a common, easily avoidable cause of an editorial-office desk return before a manuscript even reaches peer review.

Related terms

See also CASRAI’s entries on the corresponding author role and figure legend conventions, and the guide on conflict-of-interest disclosure statement templates for manuscripts.