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).
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."
which method did you use to reach this conclusion ?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :)
I have to agree here. There is a reason why scientists tend to keep names pretty simple, like Big Bang, Black Hole, x Dwarf, x Giant etc. Title should communicate a short overview, but one should keep in mind the range of people who would be interested in reading it. In the end what matters is if you communicated the entirety of the information correctly.