Title characteristics and citations in economics

We investigate the relationship between article title characteristics and citations in economics using a large data set from Web of Science. Our results suggest that articles with a short title that also contains a non-alphanumeric character achieve a higher citation count

Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research

Much academic research is never cited and may be rarely read, indicating wasted effort from the authors, referees and publishers. One reason that an article could be ignored is that its topic is, or appears to be, too obscure to be of wide interest, even if excellent scholarship produced it. This paper reports a word frequency analysis of 874,411 English article titles from 18 different Scopus natural, formal, life and health sciences categories 2009-2015 to assess the likelihood that research on obscure (rarely researched) topics is less cited. In all categories examined, unusual words in article titles associate with below average citation impact research. Thus, researchers considering obscure topics may wish to reconsider, generalise their study, or to choose a title that reflects the wider lessons that can be drawn. Authors should also consider including multiple concepts and purposes within their titles in order to attract a wider audience

What makes a ‘good’ title and (how) does it matter for citations? A review and general model of article title attributes in management science

What makes a “good” title for an article, i.e. one which might attract citations in the academic community? Answers to this question are manifold, though inconclusive across disciplines. In an attempt to provide cohesion, we integrate significant title characteristics from previous studies across disciplines into a comprehensive model and link it with citation count. Keeping the application context constant, we focus on management science and find that only non-alpha numeric characters and a balanced title structure have small, but significant effects on citation count. Surprisingly, attributes which tended to show significant effects in other disciplines (though often in opposite directions), such as length, context, and linguistic attributes exhibited no relationship with citation count

What makes a ‘good’ title and (how) does it matter for citations? A review and general model of article title attributes in management science

What makes a “good” title for an article, i.e. one which might attract citations in the academic community? Answers to this question are manifold, though inconclusive across disciplines. In an attempt to provide cohesion, we integrate significant title characteristics from previous studies across disciplines into a comprehensive model and link it with citation count. Keeping the application context constant, we focus on management science and find that only non-alpha numeric characters and a balanced title structure have small, but significant effects on citation count. Surprisingly, attributes which tended to show significant effects in other disciplines (though often in opposite directions), such as length, context, and linguistic attributes exhibited no relationship with citation count

On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications

In this paper we present a first large-scale analysis of the relationship between Mendeley readership and citation counts with particular documents bibliographic characteristics. A data set of 1.3 million publications from different fields published in journals covered by the Web of Science (WoS) has been analyzed. This work reveals that document types that are often excluded from citation analysis due to their lower citation values, like editorial materials, letters, or news items, are strongly covered and saved in Mendeley, suggesting that Mendeley readership can reliably inform the analysis of these document types. Findings show that collaborative papers are frequently saved in Mendeley, which is similar to what is observed for citations. The relationship between readership and the length of titles and number of pages, however, is weaker than for the same relationship observed for citations. The analysis of different disciplines also points to different patterns in the relationship between several document characteristics, readership, and citation counts. Overall, results highlight that although disciplinary differences exist, readership counts are related to similar bibliographic characteristics as those related to citation counts, reinforcing the idea that Mendeley readership and citations capture a similar concept of impact, although they cannot be considered as equivalent indicators

Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

© 2020 The Author. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00078Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for their publications, but would this be mistaken in some fields? Whilst poetic titles are known to be common in medicine, it is not clear whether the practice is widespread elsewhere. This article investigates the prevalence of poetic expressions in journal article titles 1996-2019 in 3.3 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually checking all phrases with at least 5 words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149 stock phrases, idioms, sayings, literary allusions, film names and song titles or lyrics. The expressions found are most common in the social sciences and the humanities. They are also relatively common in medicine, but almost absent from engineering and the natural and formal sciences. The differences may reflect the less hierarchical and more varied nature of the social sciences and humanities, where interesting titles may attract an audience. In engineering, natural science and formal science fields, authors should take extra care with poetic expressions, in case their choice is judged inappropriate. This includes interdisciplinary research overlapping these areas. Conversely, reviewers of interdisciplinary research involving the social sciences should be more tolerant of poetic licens

Cross-Cultural Communication: Its Asymmetry and Authenticity

The paper analyses a cross-cultural asymmetry in scientific papers and their titles in Russian and in English, exposes most characteristic distinctions between authentic scientific paper titles in both languages and shows explicit incongruency between authentic paper titles in English and those literally translated from Russian, which often demonstrate cross-linguistic interference between Russian and English academic style. Special attention is payed to its reasons and the ways to overcoming it, as well as to discrepancies in Russian vs. English academic style predetermined by their different grammatical organization and culture-specific cognitive and communicative dominants in the interaction between the author and the reader. The extensive corpus-based empirical data for the carried out contrastive investigation covers authentic scientific paper titles in Russian, their published translations into English, and authentic scientific paper titles from leading international linguistic journals, published in English in 2018-2020 and indexed in Scopus. The overall corpus volume is 7800 titles

How to accomplish a highly cited paper in the tourism, leisure and hospitality field

This paper identifies the main factors that affect the citation rate of an article published in the tourism, leisure and hospitality field. Using several regression techniques, it has been identified that the number of references for an article, the reputation of the main author, and obtaining early citations have a major impact on a document’s citation rate. As well as this, by means of a quantitative–qualitative analysis (fsQCA), the most efficient combinations of factors that influence the number of citations received have also been identified. This paper is useful for researchers, editors and readers interested in improving the impact of their researchS