A vantagem dos abstracts simples de artigos científicos

sábado, março 12, 2016

Journal of Informetrics
Volume 10, Issue 1, February 2016, Pages 1–8

The advantage of simple paper abstracts

Adrian Letchford, , Tobias Preis, Helen Susannah Moat

Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL, Coventry, UK

Received 16 June 2015, Revised 1 November 2015, Accepted 1 November 2015, Available online 13 December 2015


Get rights and content

Open Access funded by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

Under a Creative Commons license


Highlights

• We investigate whether or not the style of a scientific paper's abstract bears any relation to the number of times that paper is cited.

• We find that papers whose abstracts contain more frequently used words tend to receive slightly more citations.

• We find that journals which publish papers whose abstracts are shorter and contain more frequently used words receive slightly more citations per paper.

Abstract

Each year, researchers publish an immense number of scientific papers. While some receive many citations, others receive none. Here we investigate whether any of this variance can be explained by the choice of words in a paper's abstract. We find that doubling the word frequency of an average abstract increases citations by 0.70%. We also find that journals which publish papers whose abstracts are shorter and contain more frequently used words receive slightly more citations per paper. Specifically, adding a 5 letter word to an abstract decreases the number of citations by 0.02%. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the style in which a paper's abstract is written bears some relation to its scientific impact.

Keywords: Citation analysis; Scientific writing; Computational social science; Science of science

FREE PDF GRATIS: Journal of Informetrics