IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/scient/v98y2014i3d10.1007_s11192-013-1118-1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effect of characteristics of title on citation rates of articles

Author

Listed:
  • Fatemeh Rostami

    (Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences)

  • Asghar Mohammadpoorasl

    (Qazvin University of Medical Sciences)

  • Mohammad Hajizadeh

    (McGill University)

Abstract

This study aimed to assess the association between some features of articles title and number of citations in a volume of Addictive Behavior journal. All research articles published in the volume number 32 (2007) in the Addictive Behaviors journal (n = 302) were analyzed by two independent authors. For each article, the following information has been extracted: number of citations up to June 2013 in the Scopus citation database, type of and characteristics of titles, having different words in the keywords, reference to place and presence of an acronym. The summary statistics showed that mean number of citation was 16.36 ± 19.55 times. Articles with combinational title (use of a hyphen or a colon separating different ideas within a sentence) and articles with different words in the keywords (at least two different keywords) had higher number of citations. The number of citations was not correlated with the number of words in the title (r = 0.05, P = 0.325). Our results suggested that some features in the paper such as type of the title and articles with keywords different from words included in the title can help to predict the number of citation counts. These findings can be used by authors and reviewers in order to maximize the impact of articles. The length of title is not associated with citation counts. Therefore, the guide for authors of journals can be more flexible regarding the length of the title.

Suggested Citation

  • Fatemeh Rostami & Asghar Mohammadpoorasl & Mohammad Hajizadeh, 2014. "The effect of characteristics of title on citation rates of articles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(3), pages 2007-2010, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:98:y:2014:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-013-1118-1
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-013-1118-1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-013-1118-1
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11192-013-1118-1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Feng Guo & Chao Ma & Qingling Shi & Qingqing Zong, 2018. "Succinct effect or informative effect: the relationship between title length and the number of citations," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 116(3), pages 1531-1539, September.
    2. Lakshmi Balachandran Nair & Michael Gibbert, 2016. "What makes a ‘good’ title and (how) does it matter for citations? A review and general model of article title attributes in management science," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1331-1359, June.
    3. Wang, Jiaxi & Zhang, Jingjing, 2023. "The impact of policy collaboration networks and policy topic networks on policy diffusion: Empirical evidence from the energy field," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    4. Zhijun LI & Jinfen XU, 2019. "The evolution of research article titles: the case of Journal of Pragmatics 1978–2018," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 121(3), pages 1619-1634, December.
    5. Giovanni Abramo & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Flavia Costa, 2016. "The effect of a country’s name in the title of a publication on its visibility and citability," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 1895-1909, December.
    6. Tehmina Amjad & Nafeesa Shahid & Ali Daud & Asma Khatoon, 2022. "Citation burst prediction in a bibliometric network," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 127(5), pages 2773-2790, May.
    7. Julián D. Cortés, 2023. "Top, mid-tier, and predatory alike? The lexical structure of titles and abstracts of six business and management journals," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 73(1), pages 297-316, February.
    8. Juan Xie & Kaile Gong & Jiang Li & Qing Ke & Hyonchol Kang & Ying Cheng, 2019. "A probe into 66 factors which are possibly associated with the number of citations an article received," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(3), pages 1429-1454, June.
    9. Iman Tahamtan & Askar Safipour Afshar & Khadijeh Ahamdzadeh, 2016. "Factors affecting number of citations: a comprehensive review of the literature," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(3), pages 1195-1225, June.
    10. Ton Mooij, 2015. "Exploring a prototype framework of web-based and peer-reviewed “European Educational Research Quality Indicators” (EERQI)," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(1), pages 1037-1055, January.
    11. Andrea Fronzetti Colladon & Ciriaco Andrea D’Angelo & Peter A. Gloor, 2020. "Predicting the future success of scientific publications through social network and semantic analysis," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 124(1), pages 357-377, July.
    12. Carlo Galli & Stefano Guizzardi, 2021. "The Effect of Article Characteristics on Citation Number in a Diachronic Dataset of the Biomedical Literature on Chronic Inflammation: An Analysis by Ensemble Machines," Publications, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-11, April.
    13. Shesen Guo & Ganzhou Zhang & Qiuhong Ju & Yu Chen & Qianfeng Chen & Lulu Li, 2015. "The evolution of conceptual diversity in economics titles from 1890 to 2012," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 102(3), pages 2073-2088, March.
    14. Fan, Lingxu & Guo, Lei & Wang, Xinhua & Xu, Liancheng & Liu, Fangai, 2022. "Does the author’s collaboration mode lead to papers’ different citation impacts? An empirical analysis based on propensity score matching," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(4).
    15. Martorell Cunil, Onofre & Otero González, Luis & Durán Santomil, Pablo & Mulet Forteza, Carlos, 2023. "How to accomplish a highly cited paper in the tourism, leisure and hospitality field," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    16. James Hartley, 2015. "Inaccuracies in titles," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 103(1), pages 329-330, April.
    17. Matthias Gnewuch & Klaus Wohlrabe, 2017. "Title characteristics and citations in economics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(3), pages 1573-1578, March.
    18. Sergio Jimenez & Youlin Avila & George Dueñas & Alexander Gelbukh, 2020. "Automatic prediction of citability of scientific articles by stylometry of their titles and abstracts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(3), pages 3187-3232, December.
    19. Babak Sohrabi & Hamideh Iraj, 2017. "The effect of keyword repetition in abstract and keyword frequency per journal in predicting citation counts," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(1), pages 243-251, January.
    20. Xiomara S. Q. Chacon & Thiago C. Silva & Diego R. Amancio, 2020. "Comparing the impact of subfields in scientific journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 125(1), pages 625-639, October.
    21. Ruan, Xuanmin & Zhu, Yuanyang & Li, Jiang & Cheng, Ying, 2020. "Predicting the citation counts of individual papers via a BP neural network," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 14(3).
    22. Rahman Sahragard & Hussein Meihami, 2016. "A diachronic study on the information provided by the research titles of applied linguistics journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 108(3), pages 1315-1331, September.
    23. Xuechun Xiang & Jing Li, 2020. "A diachronic comparative study of research article titles in linguistics and literature journals," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 122(2), pages 847-866, February.
    24. Mike Thelwall, 2017. "Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(1), pages 307-320, January.
    25. Xie, Qing & Wang, Jiamin & Kim, Giyeong & Lee, Soobin & Song, Min, 2021. "A sensitivity analysis of factors influential to the popularity of shared data in data repositories," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 15(3).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:98:y:2014:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-013-1118-1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.