Slashdot Mirror
Scientific Papers With Shorter Titles Get More Citations
sciencehabit writes: Articles with shorter titles tend to get cited more often than those with longer headers, concludes a study published today, which examined 140,000 papers published between 2007 and 2013. It appears in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Citations are a key currency in the academic world. The number of times other researchers cite a scientist’s work is often an important metric in hiring and workplace evaluations. Citations also play a role in determining a journal’s place in the scholarly pecking order, with journals that publish more highly cited papers earning a higher “impact factor” (although many critics challenge that measure).
The title of my next paper.
Go for it!
Oh, maybe that's because algorithmically generated papers tend to generate long titles.
Check out the generated phrases here.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The more niche your research topic, the longer the title has to be to describe it, and correspondingly the fewer people will be interested. Compare, for example, "A New Hierarchy of Phylogenetic Models Consistent with Heterogeneous Substitution Rates" with "The Origin of Chemical Elements". While one will be much more cited that the other, the reason isn't the title length.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Is anyone that surprised by this? The more general the subject of the paper, the less descriptive the title needs to be. And likewise, the more general the subject of the paper, the more generally applicable it is to other papers.
"Scientific papers with more general themes are more often cited in other papers."
I think the reason has more to do with the fact that research papers with longer titles have more specific research subjects. "A possible cause of malaria outbreaks during the breeding period of glossina genus on the south coast of Mozambique" would be a very specific topic and likely to attract many citations.
... seams to fall in the same category as the paper at hand, i.e. causality vs correlation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation
When I hear science I have images of alikes of Leonardo and Einstein. Close bordering on them but a sign of modern times are groups like those that built rockets, nuclear holocaust device or worked on Genome - always done in groups. When I read studies like in TFA I have impression that science of today is just an occupation for a whole bunch of little bureaucrats though. This of course does wrong to great many scientists that brings our knowledge a little bit further every so little publication. But somehow I cannot imagine science being done in crowds because crowds of scientists are as silly as crowds of farmers or of those silly bitches called computer scientists (who are neither scientists nor engineers). Is this the only thing that remained for us - a place in a faceless crowd struggling to get a tallar or two for another day or pointless study in a big project filled with great egos and usually no greatness? Kind of what Pascal meant when looking at the vast spaces of the universe or?
Maybe scientists make their titles too long when they don't yet really understand what they are talking about. Which is why you are doing research on it, when they do fully understand the're able to decide on a better title. This also helps others to read the article more easily.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
And get fewer citations because they are obscure.
The papers that get cited tend to solve important but very general problems that can be summed up by a short title.
Or that would be my guess. (I'm generalising, obviously).
mine will be: People with 2 legs more common than those with 1.
Disproved by Heather Mills ... who has one leg and is as common as they come.
If you're a newbie in a field you may feel the need to use a jargony title to get noticed by editors. If you're a big name it may not matter.
There's a figure which shows this supposed correlation. It is AMAZINGLY weak and looks like it's biased by a couple of short titled, very highly cited papers.
Most of the paper length/citation counts form a nice uniform blob in the middle of the graph.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It shows you how dishonest and stupid many 'researchers' are...
I hope that in general papers with less bullshit get more citations.
Not all title lengths are equally likely. I should imagine that shorter titles are simply more common than longer ones.
My next paper will be called "?".
subtitle: "And Stuff"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
On Slashdot are garbage and not worth citing. This is an obvious article is one of those obvious examples.
Perhaps people who write more citable papers tend to prefer more concise titles.
Did anyone say there was a direct causation?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Papers with shorter titles tend to simply be broader spectrum review articles, which naturally reach much wider audience than specialist papers with long and precise titles. Mystery solved.
I wonder if it applies to forum comments as well... Let's find out!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
ohh shit
If a subset of all papers is considered such that the titles of the papers in the said subset have a number of words contained within amounting to significantly fewer than the number of words appearing in the titles of papers not contained within that subset, then it is possible to conclude the number of citations the former subset attract can be described as being lower in quantity than the number of citations attracted by the latter subset.
What he said
The title of my next paper: "" (less the quotes)
Or maybe it's a case of tl;dr
Comments with shorter subjects get more replies.
Damnit!
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
After reading the article, and the shortest titles, another possibility occurred to me: reviews and meta-analyses are more likely to be cited and are more likely to have shorter titles. It's well-established that they are more likely to be cited; I suspect the second part is also true.
The "prions" paper that they discuss, for example, is a review. People are probably more likely to cite a review because it covers so much ground.
This is sort of a variant of what you're saying about niche versus broad papers, but at the same time not really: it's more about encompassing a lot of other papers within it. If I need to cite three papers on prions, and they're all discussed in a review, it's easier to just cite the review paper three times and include it once in the references than cite three different papers, each of which is included in the references separately.
So the take-away message is that if you want to get cited a lot, write a good review paper.
[1]: 0
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
Just as short but more sexy.
I wonder if it applies to forum comments as well... Let's find out!
Probably...
Algorithmically generated papers try to imitate what's generated by legitimate writers. If people were to mostly write papers with short titles, it would be a tad harder to hide the voidness of meaning in titles any person could understand :)
My experience is that the exact opposite is true. If you look at the papers that receive most citations in a researcher's profile, it's usually the ones that are longer, have many keywords in them and thus receive more hits from search engines.
No one did. But I'm sure you will notice that many of these comments (including the jokes) assume that a shorter title causes more citations. When a news article states "Men with shorter haircuts get more dates" the natural tendency is to infer the author is claiming that one causes the other. The format appears to be "(Something you can control) get more (something you want)."
"Shorter titles mean more citations"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I covered this ages ago in my oft-cited paper "Science FTW".
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It has historical precedent, it provokes interest, and it could apply to any scientific discipline.
Goto Considered Harmful
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.