Are Shorter Article Titles More Attractive for Citations? Cross-sectional Study of 22 Scientific Journals (original) (raw)
Related papers
Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often
2012
The aim of this study was to evaluate some features of article titles from open access journals and to assess the possible impact of these titles on predicting the number of article views and citations. METHODS: Research articles (n = 423, published in October 2008) from all Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals and from 12 Biomed Central (BMC) journals were evaluated. Publication metrics (views and citations) were analyzed in December 2011. The titles were classified according to their contents, namely methods-describing titles and results-describing titles. The number of title characters, title typology, the use of a question mark, reference to a specific geographical region, and the use of a colon or a hyphen separating different ideas within a sentence were analyzed to identify predictors of views and citations. A logistic regression model was used to identify independent title characteristics that could predict citation rates. RESULTS: Short-titled articles had higher viewing and citation rates than those with longer titles. Titles containing a question mark, containing a reference to a specific geographical region, and that used a colon or a hyphen were associated with a lower number of citations. Articles with results-describing titles were cited more often than those with methods-describing titles. After multivariate analysis, only a low number of characters and title typology remained as predictors of the number of citations. CONCLUSIONS: Some features of article titles can help predict the number of article views and citation counts. Short titles presenting results or conclusions were independently associated with higher citation counts. The findings presented here could be used by authors, reviewers, and editors to maximize the impact of articles in the scientific community.
Titles in research articles: changes across time and discipline
Learned Publishing, 2022
Titles are a crucial feature of research papers and have become increasingly important with changes in publishing practices and the explosion of published research. As a result, novice writers seeking to get their work noticed in international journals might benefit from a clear understanding of the features of research titles and an awareness of the relationship between language and disciplinary context. In this study, we explore this relationship and the impact of changing contexts on titles across the last 60 years on the length, form and content of 36,000 titles from the ten leading journals from six disciplines spread along a soft-hard science continuum. Our results show a considerable increase in the length of titles coupled with more interrogative and compound titles in almost all disciplines. There has also been a growing mention of methods in the titles of hard knowledge papers with more frequent inclusion of results in the softer domains. These diachronic changes can be attributed to different characteristics of the fields and of the changing dynamics of the publishing context. Our findings have important implications for early career academics seeking to publish in English and contribute to studies of diachronic analysis of academic discourse.
Ecology and Evolution, 2015
A poorly chosen article title may make a paper difficult to discover or discourage readership when discovered, reducing an article's impact. Yet, it is unclear how the structure of a manuscript's title influences readership and impact. We used manuscript tracking data for all manuscripts submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from 2004 to 2013 and citation data for papers published in this journal from 1987 to 2011 to examine how title features changed and whether a manuscript's title structure was predictive of success during the manuscript review process and/or impact (citation) after publication. Titles of manuscripts submitted to Functional Ecology became marginally longer (after controlling for other variables), broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study. Papers with subtitles were less likely to be rejected by editors both pre-and post-peer review, although both effects were small and the presence of subtitles in published papers was not predictive of citations. Papers with specific names of study organisms in their titles fared poorly during editorial (but not peer) review and, if published, were less well cited than papers whose titles did not include specific names. Papers with intermediate length titles were more successful during editorial review, although the effect was small and title word count was not predictive of citations. No features of titles were predictive of reviewer willingness to review papers or the length of time a paper was in peer review. We conclude that titles have changed in structure over time, but features of title structure have only small or no relationship with success during editorial review and post-publication impact. The title feature that was most predictive of manuscript success: papers whose titles emphasize broader conceptual or comparative issues fare better both pre-and post-publication than do papers with organism-specific titles. 1970
Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2022
Titles are a key part of every academic genre and are particularly important in research papers. Today, online searches are overwhelmingly based on articles rather than journals which means that writers must, more than ever, make their titles both informative and appealing to attract readers who may go on to read, cite and make use of their research. In this paper we explore the key features of 5070 titles in the leading journals of six disciplines in the human and physical sciences to identify their typical structural patterns and content foci. In addition to proposing a model of title patterns, we show there are major disciplinary differences which can be traced to different characteristics of the fields and of the topics of the articles themselves. Our findings have important implications for EAP and ERPP teachers working with early career academic writers.
This paper evidences the progressive adoption of a journalistic approach in title writing in certain scientific fields and suggests the reasons why this evolution has not affected all disciplines. The study is based on an analysis of 8,000 scientific research articles published over the last 25 years. The corpus was carefully selected following the advice of scientific researchers from several university departments. Factors such as the position of the journals in their impact list and the multidisciplinary or specific profile of the publication were considered. The results indicate that anticipating the conclusions in the title has become common practice in experimental works of biomedical research. An analysis of the linguistic characteristics of these conclusive titles is included to identify their basic components. It is suggested that instruction on the use of journalistic strategies is advisable for non-native writers and readers of biomedical research articles in high- rankin...
Publications, 2016
Reporting guidelines for clinical research designs emerged in the mid-1990s and have influenced various aspects of research articles, including titles, which have also been subject to changing uses with the growth of electronic database searching and efforts to reduce bias in literature searches. We aimed (1) to learn more about titles in clinical medicine today and (2) to develop an efficient, reliable way to study titles over time and on the fly-for quick application by authors, manuscript editors, translators and instructors. We compared content and form in titles from two general medical journals-the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the British Medical Journal-and two anesthesiology journals (the European Journal of Anaesthesiology and Anesthesiology); we also analyzed the inter-rater reliability of our coding. Significant content differences were found in the frequencies of mentions of methods, results (between general and subspecialty titles), and geographic setting; phrasing differences were found in the prevalence of full-sentence and compound titles (and their punctuation). NEJM titles were significantly shorter, and this journal differed consistently on several features. We conclude that authors must learn to efficiently survey titles for form and content patterns when preparing manuscripts to submit to unfamiliar journals or on resubmitting to a new journal after rejection.
The impact of title length and punctuation marks on article citations
2015
In literature, a number of factors have been reported as affecting citations to articles. This paper is intended to find out if the number of citations made to an article was associated with title length and number of punctuation marks in titles. The article also attempts to determine the most/least frequently used punctuation marks in article titles, and to study titling features in top-30 articles in the dataset examined. To extract the data, ISI Web of Science was searched using the fields, source ‘SO = Scientometrics’ and publishing year ‘PY = 2009-2011’. In all, 650 article titles constituted the sample data of the study. To determine title length in words and in characters (with no spaces), the ‘word count’ option – ‘statistics’ – in Microsoft Word was used. The types and number of punctuation marks were extracted using the ‘find and replace’ option in Microsoft Word. Data analysis revealed that the two variables title length and citations to articles were not correlated; the ...
Research Article Titles and Disciplinary Conventions: A Corpus Study of Eight Disciplines
Journal of Academic Writing, 2015
Research articles are clearly influenced by the discipline of the research being reported. Just as disciplinary conventions place constraints on, for example, the moves and language use of abstracts and introductions, they also provide a set of options for title design. This study attempts to identify the title conventions of eight disciplines by focusing on various features that play a part in title design: the use of multiple-unit titles (those with subtitles); the use of noun phrases to form the title; and 'a' or 'the' in initial position. The length of titles is investigated, as is the proportion of substantive words. Data is based on a 3,200-title corpus of titles from research articles published in prestigious journals in four disciplines in the hard sciences (botany, fluid engineering, geology, and medicine) and four in the soft sciences (economics, education, history, and sociology). The data is presented in a visual form that compares title features by discipline, to demonstrate title conventions and to help novice writers understand the features and options available.