The advantage of short paper titles
Adrian Letchford, Helen Susannah Moat, Tobias Preis
Published 26 August 2015.DOI: 10.1098/rsos.150266
Abstract
Vast numbers of scientific articles are published each year, some of which attract considerable attention, and some of which go almost unnoticed. Here, we investigate whether any of this variance can be explained by a simple metric of one aspect of the paper's presentation: the length of its title. Our analysis provides evidence that journals which publish papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper. These results are consistent with the intriguing hypothesis that papers with shorter titles may be easier to understand, and hence attract more citations.
FREE PDF GRATIS: Royal Society Open Science
