Titles, Abstracts and Conservation

So... this might seem a bit of a tedious rant, but bear with me, because i think it's really important.

This is a title taken at random from the latest issue of animal conservation (the first TOC i could find in my inbox):

Can we separate the sinners from the scapegoats?

I have no particular gripe with the author so i will not mention them here, or the paper itself, which is as it turns out is an interesting commentary on the feature paper of the issue. However, there is absolutely no way you can tell that from the title. I am sure that many if not al of you find it tedious when you have to open an article simply to determine its theme, let alone whether it is specifically relevant or of interest to you and your research or the topic you are searching for at the time. Even worse is when you still cannot be sure after having read the abstract.

This has two major problems:

1. It wastes busy peoples time and energy (or they simply skip things where the subject is not immediately obvious)

2. It is difficult to find said articles when reviewing the literature.

The second of these problems can be partially addressed by using appropriate keywords etc. However, having recently been part of a systematic review (link to syst rev), I have come to realise that this is a non-trivial issue.

So... if you are writing, consider this a plea: No catchy titles unless you have a useful subtitle and if you are a journal, remember how the people using your product think and behave and put your foot down on uninformative titles.