Articles with shorter titles receive more citations, says study

Nature : Journals that “publish papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper,” according to a study published in Royal Society Open Science. Adrian Letchford of the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, and his colleagues mined the Scopus database and analyzed 140 000 papers listed there that were published between 2007 and 2013. They reached their conclusion by comparing title lengths and numbers of citations. However intriguing their finding, the researchers say, it is not necessarily definitive because of the number of other factors that could be involved, including the fact that different journals place different restrictions on the number of characters allowed in a title and the fact that subject matter and author seniority can also affect a paper’s citation rate. Regardless, clear, tightly constructed titles are always in the authors’ best interests, says Karl Ziemelis, Nature‘s chief physical sciences editor.