Terms in the title of a text should not be accompanied by their abbreviation.

If a term occurs frequently in a text, accompany it by its abbreviation on first mention and just use the abbreviation in all further references.



If the term only occurs once in the text, there is usually no need to give the abbreviation at all. Also note that some very well-known acronyms do not need to be explained (e.g., UK, EU, NATO), and those abbreviations that appear as nouns in an authoritative English dictionary do not need to be spelt out on first use.




However, there are texts in which you should add an abbreviation after a term even though the term only occurs once. One case is legal or administrative texts, where for the sake of precision and clarity the abbreviation is as important to include as the full term.



Another case is a text in which the full term is not as useful to the reader as the abbreviation. In some institutions, for example, writers often translate the full names of organizations to help non-native readers, but those translations are not used by other institutions. In such cases, the original-language abbreviation becomes particularly important for the reader as an identifier, as in the example of the Centre de Recerca d’Alta Muntanya (CRAM) below.



A further case is a text in which the full term is not as reliable as the abbreviation. On the web, for example, a research organization called the Centre de Recursos de Biodiversitat Animal is variously rendered as the Animal Biodiversity Resource Centre, the Resource Centre for Animal Biodiversity and the Centre for Resources in Animal Biodiversity. In such cases, add the full term’s official abbreviation (in this case, CRBA) even after an isolated reference.

Finally, however, do not use abbreviations simply because they make a text look more official and without considering whether the reader really benefits by them.