Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often

Title, abstract and keywords: a practical guide to maximize the visibility and impact of academic papers

In a growing digital landscape, enhancing the discoverability and resonance of scientific articles is essential. Here, we offer 10 recommendations to amplify the discoverability of studies in search engines and databases. Particularly, we argue that the strategic use and placement of key terms in the title, abstract and keyword sections can boost indexing and appeal. By surveying 230 journals in ecology and evolutionary biology, we found that current author guidelines may unintentionally limit article findability. Our survey of 5323 studies revealed that authors frequently exhaust abstract word limits-particularly those capped under 250 words. This suggests that current guidelines may be overly restrictive and not optimized to increase the dissemination and discoverability of digital publications. Additionally, 92% of studies used redundant keywords in the title or abstract, undermining optimal indexing in databases. We encourage adopting structured abstracts to maximize the incorporation of key terms in titles, abstracts and keywords. In addition, we encourage the relaxation of abstract and keyword limitations in journals with strict guidelines, and the inclusion of multilingual abstracts to broaden global accessibility. These recommendations to editors are designed to improve article engagement and facilitate evidence synthesis, thereby aligning scientific publishing with the modern needs of academic research.

A memory-theoretic account of citation propagation

Despite the common assumption that citations are indicative of an article's scientific merit, increasing evidence indicates that citation counts are largely driven by variables unrelated to quality. In this article, we treat people's decisions of what to cite as an instance of memory retrieval and show that observed citation patterns are well accounted for by a model of memory. The proposed exposure model anticipates that small alterations in factors that affect people's ability to retrieve to-be-cited articles from memory early in their life cycle are magnified over time and can lead to the emergence of highly cited papers. This effect occurs even when there is no variation in the starting point exposure probabilities (i.e. when assuming a level playing field where all articles are treated equally and of equal 'quality'), and is exacerbated by natural variation in retrievability of articles due to encoding. We discuss the implications of the model within the context of research evaluation and hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.

Writing a Scientific Review Article: Comprehensive Insights for Beginners

Review articles present comprehensive overview of relevant literature on specific themes and synthesise the studies related to these themes, with the aim of strengthening the foundation of knowledge and facilitating theory development. The significance of review articles in science is immeasurable as both students and researchers rely on these articles as the starting point for their research. Interestingly, many postgraduate students are expected to write review articles for journal publications as a way of demonstrating their ability to contribute to new knowledge in their respective fields. However, there is no comprehensive instructional framework to guide them on how to analyse and synthesise the literature in their niches into publishable review articles. The dearth of ample guidance or explicit training results in students having to learn all by themselves, usually by trial and error, which often leads to high rejection rates from publishing houses. Therefore, this article seeks to identify these challenges from a beginner's perspective and strives to plug the identified gaps and discrepancies. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to serve as a systematic guide for emerging scientists and to summarise the most important information on how to write and structure a publishable review article.

[Guide to write a scientific article]

Publishing a scientific article is challenging for early-career researchers and clinicians. Success is not solely determined by robust research methods, but also by clear and logical presentation of results. Without clear communication, disruptive findings can be overlooked. A well-structured manuscript leads the reader logically from the introduction to the conclusion. Maintaining a consistent narrative ensures lasting impact. In this paper, we provide practical guidelines for drafting an effective scientific manuscript. Carefully crafted articles increase the chance of acceptance and improve comprehension among diverse specialists. We emphasize the importance of presenting a clear, relevant, and engaging story within a structured framework, highly valued by editors, reviewers, and readers.

Content and form of original research articles in general major medical journals

The title of an article is the main entrance for reading the full article. The aim of our work therefore is to examine differences of title content and form between original research articles and its changes over time. Using PubMed we examined title properties of 500 randomly chosen original research articles published in the general major medical journals BMJ, JAMA, Lancet, NEJM and PLOS Medicine between 2011 and 2020. Articles were manually evaluated with two independent raters. To analyze differences between journals and changes over time, we performed random effect meta-analyses and logistic regression models. Mentioning of results, providing any quantitative or semi-quantitative information, using a declarative title, a dash or a question mark were rarely used in the title in all considered journals. The use of a subtitle, methods-related items, such as mentioning of methods, clinical context or treatment increased over time (all p < 0.05), while the use of phrasal tiles decreased over time (p = 0.044). Not a single NEJM title contained a study name, while the Lancet had the highest usage of it (45%). The use of study names increased over time (per year odds ratio: 1.13 (95% CI: [1.03‒1.24]), p = 0.008). Investigating title content and form was time-consuming because some criteria could only be adequately evaluated by hand. Title content changed over time and differed substantially between the five major medical journals. Authors are advised to carefully study titles of journal articles in their target journal prior to manuscript submission.

One Secret for a High Citation Rate

The relevance of the technical results included in a scientific paper is proved by the quantity of citations received by the article over the years [...]

If this title is funny, will you cite me? Citation impacts of humour and other features of article titles in ecology and evolution

Titles of scientific papers play a key role in their discovery, and “good” titles engage and recruit readers. Humour is a particularly interesting aspect of title construction, but little is known about whether funny titles boost or limit paper impact. We used a panel of scorers to assess title humour for 2439 papers in ecology and evolution, and measured associations between humour and subsequent citation (self-citation and citation by others). Papers with funnier titles were cited less, but this appears to reflect confounding with paper importance: self-citation data suggest that authors give funnier titles to papers they consider less important. After correction for this, papers with funny titles have significantly higher citation rates ( P < 2.2 × 10−16; roughly doubling from lowest to highest humour score)—suggesting that humour recruits readers. We also examined associations between citation rates and other features of titles. Inclusion of acronyms and taxonomic names was associated with lower citation rates, while assertive-statement phrasing and presence of colons, question marks, and political regions were associated with somewhat higher citation rates. Title length had no effect on citation. Our results suggest that scientists can use creativity with titles without having their work condemned to obscurity.

Citation counts and journal impact factors do not capture some indicators of research quality in the behavioural and brain sciences

Citation data and journal impact factors are important components of faculty dossiers and figure prominently in both promotion decisions and assessments of a researcher's broader societal impact. Although these metrics play a large role in high-stakes decisions, the evidence is mixed about whether they are strongly correlated with indicators of research quality. We use data from a large-scale dataset comprising 45 144 journal articles with 667 208 statistical tests and data from 190 replication attempts to assess whether citation counts and impact factors predict three indicators of research quality: (i) the accuracy of statistical reporting, (ii) the evidential value of the reported data and (iii) the replicability of a given experimental result. Both citation counts and impact factors were weak and inconsistent predictors of research quality, so defined, and sometimes negatively related to quality. Our findings raise the possibility that citation data and impact factors may be of limited utility in evaluating scientists and their research. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of current incentive structures and discuss alternative approaches to evaluating research.

A Machine Learning Model to Predict Citation Counts of Scientific Papers in Otology Field

One of the most widely used measures of scientific impact is the number of citations. However, due to its heavy-tailed distribution, citations are fundamentally difficult to predict but can be improved. This study was aimed at investigating the factors and parts influencing the citation number of a scientific paper in the otology field. Therefore, this work proposes a new solution that utilizes machine learning and natural language processing to process English text and provides a paper citation as the predicted results. Different algorithms are implemented in this solution, such as linear regression, boosted decision tree, decision forest, and neural networks. The application of neural network regression revealed that papers' abstracts have more influence on the citation numbers of otological articles. This new solution has been developed in visual programming using Microsoft Azure machine learning at the back end and Programming Without Coding Technology at the front end. We recommend using machine learning models to improve the abstracts of research articles to get more citations.

Current Status and Trends in Research on Caries Diagnosis: A Bibliometric Analysis

There are a wide variety of devices for the detection and diagnosis of caries from the initial stages. The purpose of this study was to perform a bibliometric study on research regarding caries diagnosis by identifying the contributing researchers, organizations, countries or regions, journals, and to provide an analysis of keyword co-occurrence and co-authorship networks. An advanced search was performed in Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection database, using the terms “caries diagno*” and “caries detect*” in the “topic” field, from 2013 to 2021. Bibliometric parameters were extracted using WOS’s analyze results tools and VOSviewer software. A total of 816 documents were identified. Most of them, (61.3%) are included in “Dentistry Oral Surgery & Medicine” category within WOS. The largest scientific production on the subject is observed between 2018 and 2021, with a total of 344 records. The most productive author is Mendes FM, followed by Braga MM. The journal with the most articles published on caries diagnosis is Caries Research, with 55 articles (6.74%). The terms with the highest co-occurrence refer to the validity of diagnostic methods, tools or principles used in diagnosis or general aspects related to caries detection and diagnosis.

North and South: Naming practices and the hidden dimension of global disparities in knowledge production

Contemporary social sciences aim to be diverse and inclusive, but traces of the historical dominance of Western European and North American academic institutions persist in scientific practices. One such practice is the phrasing of article titles. Our analysis shows that articles studying the global North are systematically less likely to mention the name of the country they study in their title compared to articles on the global South. This constitutes, potentially, an unwarranted claim on universality and may lead to lesser recognition of global South studies. Social and behavioral scientists must reflect on the phrasing of their article titles to avoid reproducing harmful relations of intellectual domination which limit inclusivity and constitute a barrier to the generalizability of scientific knowledge.

The legacy of Eurocentrism continues to affect knowledge production in the social sciences. Evidence produced in and about the global North is assumed to be more “universal,” whereas evidence from or produced in the global South is considered valid only for specific contexts (i.e., “localized”). We argue that these dynamics are evident in the phrasing of articles’ titles based on the examination of more than half a million social science research articles indexed by Scopus (1996 to 2020). We find that empirical articles written by authors affiliated to institutions of the global North, using data from these countries, are less likely to include a concrete geographical reference in their titles. When authors are affiliated to global South institutions, and use evidence from global South countries, the names of these countries are more likely to be part of the article’s title. We confirm this overarching pattern by looking at 1) differences between world regions, 2) differences within world regions, and 3) patterns in 23 social science subfields. These gaps are large and consistent, yet article naming conventions are merely the “tip of the iceberg” of the imbalances in knowledge production between the global North and South.

The relationship between citations and the linguistic traits of specific academic discourse communities identified by using social network analysis

For a research article (RA) to be accepted, not only for publication, but also by its readers, it must display proficiency in the content, methodologies and discourse conventions of its specific discipline. While numerous studies have investigated the linguistic characteristics of different research disciplines, none have utilised Social Network Analysis techniques to identify communities prior to analysing their language use. This study aims to investigate the language use of three highly specific research communities in the fields of Psychology, Physics and Sports Medicine. We were interested in how these language features are related to the total number of citations, the eigencentrality within the community and the intra-network citations of the individual RAs. Applying Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis approach, a total of 771 RA abstracts published between 2010 and 2019 were analysed. We evaluated correlations between one of three network characteristics (citations, eigencentrality and in-degree), the corpora’s dimensions and 72 individual language features. The pattern of correlations suggest that features cited by other RAs within the discourse community network are in almost all cases different from those that are cited by RAs from outside the network. This finding highlights the challenges of writing for both a discipline-specific and a wider audience.

Extinction by citation deficiency: are botany journals at risk?

Purpose

With the current dynamics of scientific publishing increasingly driven by citation metrics, it is quite possible this will lead to the loss of some lower-ranked journals as they will be undervalued by authors, research institutions and research funders. This has been specifically predicted for natural science journals, but the efforts of editors of such journals to improve reputation have not been quantitatively assessed. This research aimed to fill this knowledge gap and assess the potential vulnerability of lower-ranked botany journals.

Design/methodology/approach

Changes in article citation rates since 2009 for 21 lower-ranked general botany journals were examined by least squares linear regression and factors potentially predictive of higher citation potential by principal component analysis. The findings were then examined in a case study of the publishing that followed the celebrated discovery of a living-fossil plant (Wollemia nobilis) in the mid-1990s.

Findings

Article citation rates steadily declined across most of these 21 journals over the period, and if submissions had been favoured (directly or indirectly) for citation potential, this appears to have been an ineffective, perhaps even a flawed, endeavour. Analysis of quantifiable article attributes across a subset of these journals revealed inconsistent relationships with no predictive value for citation potential. The case study clearly highlighted some processes contributing to declining citation rates and the value of botanical reporting well beyond that indicated by citation metrics.

Research limitations/implications

It is not possible to know how important prediction of citation potential (directly or indirectly) is when journal editors accept papers for review or publication (such information is not made public, and this might not be a formalised process), so this study is only based what is considered (by the author) to be a reasonable assumption that all journals aim to improve their reputation and use citation metrics as one determinant of this.

Social implications

Unless we give value to lower-ranked regional botany journals in other ways than citations, the current trends in citation rates could lead to the diminution, even loss, of their valuable contribution biodiversity conservation.

Originality/value

Although concerns have been expressed about the long-term viability of natural history journals, this is the first research to examine this quantitatively using citation metrics.

Quoted speech in linguistics research article titles: patterns of use and effects on citations

This paper investigates the uses and scholarly impact of quoted/direct speech in research article titles (e.g., "I Know I'm Generalizing but…": How Teachers' Perceptions Influence ESL Learner Placement) across the 50 highest-listed linguistics journals according to Clarivate Analytics’ inCites Journal Citation Reports. The aims of the study were to: (1) uncover the prevalence of titles featuring quoted speech between 1980 and 2019, (2) describe how directly reported speech is utilised structurally in article titles, and (3) investigate the effects of various patterns of use of quotations on articles’ age-weighted citation rates. 640 linguistics articles with speech act titles were uncovered, occurring with an incidence of 1.8% in the dataset (n = 36,438), although their prevalence has risen significantly since 2004. Structural analysis revealed 90.9% of quotations were contained in the first segment of a compound title, serving to create an information gap (often for the purposes of provoking interest or intrigue), which is resolved in the second segment; the research article’s topic. Regression analysis showed that speech act titles were significant negative determinants of articles’ age-weighted citations, particularly the prevalent pattern of compound structures featuring a quotation phrased as a declarative. The length of the quotation was found to exert no significant effect, although quotations that were not marked by single or double quotation marks were found to have an especially suppressed scholarly impact.

Best practices for fNIRS publications

The application of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in the neurosciences has been expanding over the last 40 years. Today, it is addressing a wide range of applications within different populations and utilizes a great variety of experimental paradigms. With the rapid growth and the diversification of research methods, some inconsistencies are appearing in the way in which methods are presented, which can make the interpretation and replication of studies unnecessarily challenging. The Society for Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy has thus been motivated to organize a representative (but not exhaustive) group of leaders in the field to build a consensus on the best practices for describing the methods utilized in fNIRS studies. Our paper has been designed to provide guidelines to help enhance the reliability, repeatability, and traceability of reported fNIRS studies and encourage best practices throughout the community. A checklist is provided to guide authors in the preparation of their manuscripts and to assist reviewers when evaluating fNIRS papers.

Empirical analysis of the text structure of original research articles in medical journals

Successful publishing of an article depends on several factors, including the structure of the main text, the so-called introduction, methods, results and discussion structure (IMRAD). The first objective of our work is to provide recent results on the number of paragraphs (pars.) per section used in articles published in major medical journals. Our second objective is the investigation of other structural elements, i.e., number of tables, figures and references and the availability of supplementary material. We analyzed data from randomly selected original articles published in years 2005, 2010 and 2015 from the journals The BMJ, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and PLOS Medicine. Per journal and year 30 articles were investigated. Random effect meta-analyses were performed to provide pooled estimates. The effect of time was analyzed by linear mixed models. All articles followed the IMRAD structure. The number of pars. per section increased for all journals over time with 1.08 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.70-1.46) pars. per every two years. The largest increase was observed for the methods section (0.29 pars. per year; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.19-0.39). PLOS Medicine had the highest number of pars. The number of tables did not change, but number of figures and references increased slightly. Not only the standard IMRAD structure should be used to increase the likelihood for publication of an article but also the general layout of the target journal. Supplementary material has become standard. If no journal-specific information is available, authors should use 3/10/9/8 pars. for the introduction/methods/results/discussion sections.

Journal Article Titles Impact Their Citation Rates

A journal article's title gives authors one chance to make a first impression and communicate succinctly the findings from their important research. The goal of a research article rests in disseminating information. Both authors and academic journals benefit from increasing the number of times an investigation is cited. A scientific manuscript title accurately summarizes the research using key words that can be identified with search engines. This review aims to condense evidence-based research to improve a scientific manuscript title for both clarity and impact.

Title does matter: a cross-sectional study of 30 journals in the Medical Laboratory Technology category

Introduction

First impression on potential readers is created by the title; therefore, authors should give importance to the title structure. The aim of this study was to establish whether articles created by a smaller number of authors and with shorter, descriptive or declarative titles gain more citations and whether article title length and number of authors correlate to the number of citations.

Material and methods

A cross-sectional study on article citation data for 30 scientific journals published in 2016 in Medical Laboratory Technology field according to Web of Science database was conducted. The type of article, type of title, as well as number of words in the title and number of authors was recorded.

Results

In the group of original articles (N = 2623), articles with declarative titles (N = 336, 13%) showed statistically higher number of citations in multiple comparison analysis when compared to descriptive titles (P < 0.001). No correlation was found between number of citations and title word count (r = 0.07, P < 0.001) nor between number of citations and number of authors in group of original articles (r = 0.09, P < 0.001). Original articles with descriptive titles longer than 15 words or with more than six authors are cited more (P = 0.005 and P < 0.001, respectively).

Conclusion

Based on results of our study, titles do matter. Therefore, authors of original articles might want to consider including their findings in the title and having longer titles.

The Principles of Biomedical Scientific Writing: Title

The title of a paper is "like a hat on a head or the front door to a house" and its initial impression. Writing a good and effective title makes the paper more retrievable by search engines and maximizes its impact in the scientific community. The paper's title presents what has been studied, how it has been done, and what are the major results. A well-written title is balanced for being informative and concise, as well as attractively conveying the main topic, highlighting the importance of the study. For writing a good title, it should be drafted correctly, accurately, carefully, and meticulously by the main study keywords. By removing extra and unspecific words, the final title should be unambiguous, memorable, captivating, and informative. Here, we provided an overview of the importance and function of the title as well as different types of titles in scientific medical writing. We also focused on the content and organization of the title of a hypothesis-testing paper. In addition, the features of a good title were discussed.

Physico-chemical and cytotoxic analysis of a novel large molecular weight bacteriocin produced by Lactobacillus casei TA0021

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Antimicrobial peptides produced by lactic acid bacteria have gained enormous attention owing to their health benefits. This study aimed to isolate, purify and characterize the antibacterial protein produced by autochthonous Lactobacillus casei TA0021 strain.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The antagonistic activity of L. casei TA0021 against a number of pathogenic bacteria was tested by agar well diffusion assay. The antimicrobial agent in the neutralized supernatant fluids was subjected to the action of proteolytic enzymes, catalase, lipase and lysozyme, and their tolerance to variable pH and temperature was estimated. The proteinaceous antagonistic compound was precipitated by 60% w/v ammonium sulphate, desalted and subjected to cation exchange and gel filtration chromatography. Approximate molecular weight of Lactocin was determined by SDS-PAGE and non-denaturing gel electrophoresis. Hemoglobin release assay and cytotoxicity effect of Lactocin TA0021 was determined. The results were statistically analyzed.

RESULTS

The antagonistic agent active against Salmonella Typhimurium and Shigella flexneri appeared resistant to catalase and lipase treatments, while sensitive to the tested proteolytic enzymes. Lactocin TA0021 resisted acidic pH values of 3.0, while alkaline pH values of >9 completely destroyed the activity. The antibacterial peptide was approximately 68 KDa and heat labile as lost its activity at 100°C after 5 minutes. The bacteriocin was non-toxic to MRC-5 cell lines and non-hemolytic. Purification method lead to increase in antibacterial activity while, subsequent decrease in recovery and yield was observed with increasing purification fold.

CONCLUSION

The purified antimicrobial protein from L. casei TA0021 might be used for application in medicinal and food products.

Words by the tail: Assessing lexical diversity in scholarly titles using frequency-rank distribution tail fits

This research assesses the evolution of lexical diversity in scholarly titles using a new indicator based on zipfian frequency-rank distribution tail fits. At the operational level, while both head and tail fits of zipfian word distributions are more independent of corpus size than other lexical diversity indicators, the latter however neatly outperforms the former in that regard. This benchmark-setting performance of zipfian distribution tails proves extremely handy in distinguishing actual patterns in lexical diversity from the statistical noise generated by other indicators due to corpus size fluctuations. From an empirical perspective, analysis of Web of Science (WoS) article titles from 1975 to 2014 shows that the lexical concentration of scholarly titles in Natural Sciences & Engineering (NSE) and Social Sciences & Humanities (SSH) articles increases by a little less than 8% over the whole period. With the exception of the lexically concentrated Mathematics, Earth & Space, and Physics, NSE article titles all increased in lexical concentration, suggesting a probable convergence of concentration levels in the near future. As regards to SSH disciplines, aggregation effects observed at the disciplinary group level suggests that, behind the stable concentration levels of SSH disciplines, a cross-disciplinary homogenization of the highest word frequency ranks may be at work. Overall, these trends suggest a progressive standardization of title wording in scientific article titles, as article titles get written using an increasingly restricted and cross-disciplinary set of words.

Highly Cited Occupational Therapy Articles in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index: A Bibliometric Analysis

OBJECTIVE

A bibliometric analysis was completed of highly cited occupational therapy literature and authors published from 1991 to 2014 and accessible in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-Expanded) and Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) databases.

METHOD

Data were obtained from the SCI-Expanded and SSCI. Articles referenced >100 times were categorized as highly cited articles (HCA).

RESULTS

Of 6,486 articles found, 31 were categorized as HCA. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy published the largest number of HCA (n = 8; 26%). The 31 HCA were distributed across seven countries: United States (20 articles), Canada (3), United Kingdom (3), Australia (2), the Netherlands (1), New Zealand (1), and Sweden (1). The three authors with the highest Y-index were S. J. Page, F. Clark, and W. Dunn.

CONCLUSION

A latency period of 4 to 5 yr post-publication appears to be needed for a journal article to gain citations.

Impact of lexical and sentiment factors on the popularity of scientific papers

We investigate how textual properties of scientific papers relate to the number of citations they receive. Our main finding is that correlations are nonlinear and affect differently the most cited and typical papers. For instance, we find that, in most journals, short titles correlate positively with citations only for the most cited papers, whereas for typical papers, the correlation is usually negative. Our analysis of six different factors, calculated both at the title and abstract level of 4.3 million papers in over 1500 journals, reveals the number of authors, and the length and complexity of the abstract, as having the strongest (positive) influence on the number of citations.