Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
We conducted the same analysis with the number of characters instead of the number of words and obtained similar results. We focus on words to make the results more intuitive.
We also performed regressions including the quadratic term of words and obtained substantially the same results.
References
Alimoradi, F., Javadi, M., Mohammadpoorasl, A., Moulodi, F., Hajizadeh, M., et al. (2016). The effect of key characteristics of the title and morphological features of published articles on their citation rates. Annals of Library and Information Studies (ALIS), 63(1), 74–77.
Buter, R., & van Raan, A. F. (2011). Non-alphanumeric characters in titles of scientific publications: An analysis of their occurrence and correlation with citation impact. Journal of Informetrics, 5(4), 608–617.
Ely, J. C. (2016). Beeps. American Economic Review (forthcoming).
Guo, S., Zhang, G., Ju, Q., Chen, Y., Chen, Q., & Li, L. (2015). The evolution of conceptual diversity in economics titles from 1890 to 2012. Scientometrics, 102(3), 2073–2088.
Hartley, J. (2007). Planning that title: Practices and preferences for titles with colons in academic articles. Library and Information Science Research, 29(4), 553–568. doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2007.05.002.
Nair, L. B., & Gibbert, M. (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, 107(3), 1331–1359.
Paiva, C. E., Lima, J. P. S. N., & Paiva, B. S. R. (2012). Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often. Clinics, 67(5), 509–513.
Rostami, F., Mohammadpoorasl, A., & Hajizadeh, M. (2014). The effect of characteristics of title on citation rates of articles. Scientometrics, 98(3), 2007–2010.
Subotic, S., & Mukherjee, B. (2014). Short and amusing: The relationship between title characteristics, downloads, and citations in psychology articles. Journal of Information Science, 40(1), 115–124.
Yitzhaki, M. (1994). Relation of title length of journal articles to number of authors. Scientometrics, 30(1), 321–332.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gnewuch, M., Wohlrabe, K. Title characteristics and citations in economics. Scientometrics 110, 1573–1578 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2216-7
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2216-7