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Scientific Papers With Shorter Titles Get More Citations

Posted by Soulskill on from the brevity-is-the-soul-of-academia dept.

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).

5 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Yes by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."
  2. Causation? by Michael+Woodhams · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. I RTFA and it's crap by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:I RTFA and it's crap by serviscope_minor · · Score: 3, Funny

      Bad form to self-reply, but if you want another paper (unpublished?) which analyses what's likely to get a paper accepted, there's this one which is hilarious and sadly all too true:

      http://vision.ucsd.edu/sites/d...âZ

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    2. Re:I RTFA and it's crap by hnwombat · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yes, exactly. the R squared (variance explained) is tiny. So, yeah, the effect is there, but it's unimportant (and, as you point out, skewed by outliers). There's no assessment of normality of the data (it pretty clearly isn't), which also affects the validity of the results. And, finally, when you have a very large sample size, getting a "significant" result is very easy (20,000 data points is a very large sample size, for statistical purposes). Honestly, with 20,000 data points, I could "prove" pretty much any theory I chose about that data.

      Many confounding explanations for the small correlation are ignored that might also have eliminated the observed correlation.

      FWIW, I have a PhD, I do this stuff for a living. I got a "significant" result for one of my theories that had an R-squared of 7%. While I of course reported the significance, I also pointed out that it was of no real consequence, and probably due to sample size rather than a real relationship. Especially with the problems of Popper-style hypothesis testing, one should be very careful about what one reports as "real" connections.