ArticleJRSM short reports2010
The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals.
Article in JRSM short reports, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 27 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
27 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Validity, Reliability and Feasibility of Tools to Identify Frail Older Patients in Inpatient Hospital Care: A Systematic Review.The journal of nutrition, health & aging · 2016Pooled it
- How ChatGPT writes scientific titles in medical research: structural and content differences compared to human authors.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2026Article
- Can ChatGPT write better scientific titles? A comparative evaluation of human-written and AI-generated titles.F1000Research · 2025Article
- Title, abstract and keywords: a practical guide to maximize the visibility and impact of academic papers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Toward a Unified Naming Scheme for Thermo-Active Soft Actuators: A Review of Materials, Working Principles, and Applications.Robotics reports (New Rochelle, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Citation analysis of computer systems papers.PeerJ. Computer science · 2023Article
- Healthcare Management: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on the Citations of Research Articles Published between 1967 and 2020.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- What's not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer disease articles? #InMice.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Chiropractic case reports: a review and bibliometric analysis.Chiropractic & manual therapies · 2021Review
- Title does matter: a cross-sectional study of 30 journals in the Medical Laboratory Technology category.Biochemia medica · 2020Article
- Empirical analysis of the text structure of original research articles in medical journals.PloS one · 2020Article
- The Principles of Biomedical Scientific Writing: Title.International journal of endocrinology and metabolism · 2019Review
- Automatic identification of recent high impact clinical articles in PubMed to support clinical decision making using time-agnostic features.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2019Article
- Impact of Low Back Pain Clinical Trials Measured by the Altmetric Score: Cross-Sectional Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2018Article
- Evaluation by Citation: Trends in Publication Behavior, Evaluation Criteria, and the Strive for High Impact Publications.Science and engineering ethics · 2016Article
- The advantage of short paper titles.Royal Society open science · 2015Article
- The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal.Ecology and evolution · 2015Article
- Every scientist is a memory researcher: Suggestions for making research more memorable.F1000Research · 2015Article
- Determinants of the citation rate of medical research publications from a developing country.SpringerPlus · 2014Article
- How to write a scientific manuscript for publication.Blood transfusion = Trasfusione del sangue · 2013Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectivesMost published articles are not cited and citation rates depend on many variables. We hypothesized that specific features of journal titles may be related to citation rates.
designWe reviewed the title characteristics of the 25 most cited articles and the 25 least cited articles published in 2005 in general and specialist medical journals including the Lancet, BMJ and Journal of Clinical Pathology. The title length and construction were correlated to the number of times the papers have been cited to May 2009.
settingRetrospective review of a scientific database.
participantsNone.
main outcome measuresCitation rate.
resultsThe number of citations was positively correlated with the length of the title, the presence of a colon in the title and the presence of an acronym. Factors that predicted poor citation included reference to a specific country in the title.
conclusionsThese data suggest that the construction of an article title has a significant impact on frequently the paper is cited. We hypothesize that this may be related to the way electronic searches of the literature are undertaken.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.