A large number of scientific papers are published every year, some of which attract widespread attention, while others are almost ignored. There may be many reasons for this difference, but researchers at the University of Warwick found that the length of the title is closely related to the citation rate of the article. The shorter the title of the paper, the more likely it is to be cited.
The research was published in the Royal Society Open Science, an open magazine of the Royal Society. The researchers analyzed the papers published in Scopus database from 2007 to 20 13, with 20,000 articles per year, totaling * * *140,000, and determined the number of words in the titles. They found that the shorter the title, the higher the citation rate.
The citation rate of papers is an important index to evaluate the work of academic scientists. The citation rate also determines the status of a journal. Journals can obtain higher "impact factors" by publishing papers with higher citation rate. However, it is not so easy to understand the factors that affect the citation rate. Citation takes years to accumulate.
The researchers found that there was a strong correlation between short titles and high citations for articles published in 2007 and 2008. However, for the articles published on 20 12 and 20 13, this relationship gradually weakened because there was not much time to accumulate citations.
However, when we pay attention to the journal as a whole rather than the citation rate of each paper, this difference basically disappears. On the whole, they found that journals with short titles were cited more times every year. However, there are some exceptions. Although the titles of medical papers published in The Lancet and its sub-journals are very long, they are cited many times, and the short-titled papers published in some physics journals are not cited much.
Adrian Letchford, the first author of the article and a data scientist at the University of Warwick, said: "My theory is that the shorter the title of the article, the easier it is to read and understand." However, he thinks there may be other explanations. First, high-impact journals may restrict the length of titles more strictly. The other is that the research describing the phased progress may be published in less famous journals with long titles, which makes the number of citations less.
Perhaps the most convincing example is the four papers published in Science on 20 10. The two papers with the longest titles were cited 68 times and 67 times respectively. In contrast, two papers with simpler titles, "Quantum Walk of Related Photons" and "Draft Near Genome Sequence", were cited 253 times and 700 times respectively.
The paper with the shortest title in history is Prion, which was published in Perspective of Cold Spring Harbor of Biology at 201/kloc-0, with only six words. This article is a general introduction to prions, so the author thinks it is unnecessary to add additional words. However, the author of the article is stanley prusiner, a Nobel Prize winner, which may increase the number of citations. It has been quoted 103 times.
However, Lechford also admitted that the limitation of this study is that it only analyzed 2% of the total number of papers. Therefore, even the paper with the lowest citation rate has 16 citations, which may tilt the sample, because there are many papers without any citations, regardless of their title length.