Relation of the title length of a journal article to the length of the article

The great importance of titles being highly informative is almost unanimously accepted in literature, assuming that the more informative titles are, the more effectively they serve their functions. The most common measure of title “informativeness” has been the number of “significant” (i.e., non-trivial) words included in it, and one of the factors which might be associated with it is the length of the paper, measured by its number of pages. The present study attempted to test, in a large group of journals from different areas and over six decades, the hypothesis that a paper with more pages will have more “significant” words in its title. Large samples of original research papers were drawn from each decade year of twenty-four leading journals selected from the sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. For each paper, the number of “significant” words in the title was correlated with the number of pages. Findings indicate a difference between the scientific journals on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities journals on the other. A moderate positive correlation was found in most scientific journals for many periods. In the social sciences journals, and to a greater extent, in the humanities journals, a significant positive correlation was limited to only a few periods, while the rest showed a very low correlation, or even a negative one. The different findings for the sciences are perhaps attributable to their unique inherent features. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A new approach to journal co-citation matrix construction based on the number of co-cited articles in journals

Scientometrics - Co-citation analysis is one of the most important methods in information science. Journal co-citation analysis has been widely used to analyze the relevance, relationship and...     

Succinct effect or informative effect: the relationship between title length and the number of citations

Previous studies produced mixed results with respect to the correlation between title length and number of citations. This research aims to provide a new explanation for this controversy by examining one of the largest pools of papers to date, containing over 300,000 economics papers spanning a much longer time period (1956–2012). The results show that correlation between title length and the number of citations is negative between 1956 and 2000, but becomes positive after 2000, when online searches became the predominant method for literature retrieval. Moreover, heterogeneity analyses show that longer titles are especially crucial for papers with relatively lower influence, which researchers can typically only access using online searches.     

The effect of characteristics of title on citation rates of articles

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.     

Separating the articles of authors with the same name

I describe a method to separate the articles of different authors with the same name. It is based on a distance between any two publications, defined in terms of the probability that they would have as many coincidences if they were drawn at random from all published documents. Articles with a given author name are then clustered according to their distance, so that all articles in a cluster belong very likely to the same author. The method has proven very useful in generating groups of papers that are then selected manually. This simplifies considerably citation analysis when the author publication lists are not available.     

Copyright compliance and infringement in ResearchGate full-text journal articles

In this paper, we study the spatial characteristics of a sample of 2605 highly productive economists, and a subsample of 332 economists with outstanding productivity. Individual productivity is measured in terms of a quality index that weights the number of publications up to 2007 in four journal classes. We analyze the following four issues. (1) The “funneling effect” towards the US and the clustering of scholars in the top US institutions. (2) The high degree of collective inbreeding in the training of elite members. (3) The partition of those born in a given country into brain drain (who work in a country different from their country of origin), brain circulation (who study and/or work abroad followed by a return to the home country), and stayers (whose entire academic career takes place in their country of origin). We also study the partition of the economists working in 2007 in a given geographical area into nationals (stayers plus brain circulation) and migrants (brain drained from other countries). (4) Finally, we estimate the research output in different geographical areas in two instances: when we classify researchers by the institution where they work in 2007, or by their country of origin.     

Comparison of number of citations to full original articles versus brief reports

Most biomedical journals accept original research articles in the form of “brief reports”. We compared the citations to full papers versus brief reports in a sample of journals on Infectious Diseases, Clinical Microbiology, and Antimicrobial Agents. Brief reports were cited less often than full-size articles [regression coefficient: 10.94 (95 % CI: 5.19, 16.69)] even after adjustment for the journal’s impact factor. Our findings may influence decisions of editors and authors regarding brief reports.     

Assessing gender balance among journal authors and editorial board members

The study of journal authorship and editorial board membership from a gender perspective is addressed in this paper following international recommendations about the need to obtain science and technology indicators by gender. Authorship informs us about active scientists who contribute to the production and dissemination of new knowledge through journal articles, while editorial board membership tells us about leading scientists who have obtained scientific recognition within the scientific community. This study analyses by gender the composition of the editorial boards of 131 high-quality Spanish journals in all fields of science, the presence of men and women as authors in a selection of 36 journals, and the evolution of these aspects from 1998 to 2009. Female presence is lower than male presence in authorship, editorial board membership and editorship. The presence of female authors is slightly lower than the presence of women in the Spanish Higher Education sector and doubles female presence in editorial boards, which mirrors female presence in the highest academic rank. The gender gap tends to diminish over the years in most areas, especially in authorship and very slightly in editorial board membership. Large editorial boards and having a female editor-in-chief are positively correlated with women presence in editorial boards. The situation of women in Spanish science is further assessed in an international context analysing a selection of international reference journals. The usefulness of journal-based indicators to monitor the situation of men and women in science and to assess the success of policies oriented to enhance gender equality in science is finally discussed.     

Citation context analysis and aging patterns of journal articles in molecular genetics

To compare citation history and contextual importance, eleven highly cited articles, 4 slowly aging (Type 1) and 7 quickly aging (Type 2), were ranked using an aggregate citation context measure, the Mean Utility Index. Based on citations in late (PY 6 & 7) source articles, methods papers consistently ranked higher than papers cited for research results and theoretical implications, and Type 1 methods papers ranked above all Type 2 papers. A Type 1 paper representing an important theoretical concept could not be distinguished from Type 2 papers using citation context alone.     

Predicting subsequent citations to articles published in twelve crime-psychology journals: Author impact versus journal impact

Summary Four hundred and twenty-eight articles published in 12 crime-psychology journals during the 2003 calendar year were reviewed for subsequent citations in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). Fifteen potential predictors were reduced to nine after subjecting the 15 variables to a principal components analysis with varimax rotation. The nine predictors included author characteristics - gender, occupational affiliation (academic-nonacademic), national affiliation (U.S.-other), citations per 2001-2002 first author publications - article characteristics - collaboration (single author-multiple author), article length, reviews, subject matter (corrections/criminology-legal/forensic) - and journal characteristics - journal impact. Negative binomial regression of the citations earned by these 428 journal articles in a 23 to 34 month follow-up (M = 28 months) revealed significant effects for citations per 2001-2002 first author publications, national affiliation, and review articles. These results suggest that author impact may be a more powerful predictor of citations received by a journal article than the periodical in which the article appears.     

The influence of opening up peer review on the citations of journal articles

Scientometrics - This paper studied whether opening up review reports benefits science in terms of citations by taking Nature Communications as an example. To address this question, we collected...     

Evolution in the number of authors of computer science publications

This article analyses the evolution in the number of authors of scientific publications in computer science (CS). This analysis is based on a framework that structures CS into 17 constituent areas, proposed by Wainer et al. (Commun ACM 56(8):67–63, 2013), so that indicators can be calculated for each one in order to make comparisons. We collected and mined over 200,000 article references from 81 conferences and journals in the considered CS areas, spanning a 60-year period (1954–2014). The main insights of this article are that all CS areas witness an increase in the average number of authors, in every decade, with just one slight exception. We ordered the article references by number of authors, in ascending chronological order and grouped them into decades. For each CS area, we provide a perspective of how many groups (1-author papers, 2-author papers and so on) must be considered to reach certain proportions of the total for that CS area, e.g., the 90th and 95th percentiles. Different CS areas require different number of groups to reach those percentiles. For all 17 CS areas, an analysis of the point in time in which publications with n + 1 authors overtake the publications with n authors is presented. Finally, we analyse the average number of authors and their rate of increase.     

Language use reflects scientific methodology: A corpus-based study of peer-reviewed journal articles

Recently, philosophers of science have argued that the epistemological requirements of different scientific fields lead necessarily to differences in scientific method. In this paper, we examine possible variation in how language is used in peer-reviewed journal articles from various fields to see if features of such variation may help to elucidate and support claims of methodological variation among the sciences. We hypothesize that significant methodological differences will be reflected in related differences in scientists’ language style. This paper reports a corpus-based study of peer-reviewed articles from twelve separate journals in six fields of experimental and historical sciences. Machine learning methods were applied to compare the discourse styles of articles in different fields, based on easily-extracted linguistic features of the text. Features included function word frequencies, as used often in computational stylistics, as well as lexical features based on systemic functional linguistics, which affords rich resources for comparative textual analysis. We found that indeed the style of writing in the historical sciences is readily distinguishable from that of the experimental sciences. Furthermore, the most significant linguistic features of these distinctive styles are directly related to the methodological differences posited by philosophers of science between historical and experimental sciences, lending empirical weight to their contentions.     

The impact of review articles in management and economics journal rankings and metrics

Scientometrics - In a letter to the editor, Moussa (2021) questions the impact of review articles on the ranking and indicators of journals. Applied to the management and economics FT50 journals...