Too Long your Paper Titles!

Ever seen a research article with a long title like 55 words in it? Ever written research articles with long title? Too long title? Ever wonder if it has an impact on citations? It has: the shorter your research paper titles, the more citation you will have.

Researchers Adrian Letchford, Helen Susannah Moat and Tobias Preis from Warwick Business School, University of Warwick in UK have published a research article the 26 of august 2015 titled “The advantage of short paper titles” in The Royal Society Journal.

From 2007 to 2013, they have analyzed 20,000 paper titles annually published in research journals provided by Scopus, one of the leading bibliometric platforms: 140,000 paper titles analyzed with titles from 1  through 55 words!

According to the researchers:

“Journals which publish papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper. For each year in our dataset, we rank all of the papers in terms of the number of citations received and in terms of the length of the titles, and transform these ranks into percentiles for a given year. For each journal, we then calculate the average quantile of the citations and of the title lengths, across papers and across years. Here, each blue circle represents a journal, the size of each circle represents the number of papers in our sample for that journal. Again, we find that journals that publish papers with shorter titles also tend to receive more citations per paper (Kendall’s τ=−0.19, N=625, p<0.001)”. [1]

You really want to be cited? Create short titles. Need inspiration? Look at magazine article titles, movie titles…