ArticleRoyal Society open science2015
The advantage of short paper titles.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers.
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
32 citing papers in PubMed.
- How ChatGPT writes scientific titles in medical research: structural and content differences compared to human authors.Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA · 2026Article
- Does your surname undermine your research impact?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Can ChatGPT write better scientific titles? A comparative evaluation of human-written and AI-generated titles.F1000Research · 2025Article
- Quality-checking a novel "fact sheet" on ghostly episodes.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Publications of systematic review and meta-analysis in the indexed anesthesia journals: a 10-year bibliometric analysis.Frontiers in medicine · 2025Review
- Title, abstract and keywords: a practical guide to maximize the visibility and impact of academic papers.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Ten simple rules for designing graphical abstracts.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The bibliometric and altmetric analysis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy research: how great is the impact?Frontiers in neurology · 2024Article
- Did AI get more negative recently?Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Increase Your Impact: Writing Tips to Reach a Broader Audience.ACS nanoscience Au · 2022Article
- Healthcare Management: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on the Citations of Research Articles Published between 1967 and 2020.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Dissemination of Plastic Surgery Research: An Analysis ofPlastic and reconstructive surgery. Global open · 2022Article
- A Machine Learning Model to Predict Citation Counts of Scientific Papers in Otology Field.BioMed research international · 2022Article
- Theoretical report: reflections and considerations for authors, reviewers, and editors.Revista de saude publica · 2022Review
- Enhancing Knowledge Graph Extraction and Validation From Scholarly Publications Using Bibliographic Metadata.Frontiers in research metrics and analytics · 2021Article
- Some Personal Advice Concerning How to Write Precise, Concise and Eloquent Research Articles.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2021Article
- The 100 top-cited meta-analyses of diagnostic accuracy in radiology journals: a bibliometric analysis.Insights into imaging · 2020Article
- Article
- 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
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vast numbers of scientific articles are published each year, some of which attract considerable attention, and some of which go almost unnoticed. Here, we investigate whether any of this variance can be explained by a simple metric of one aspect of the paper's presentation: the length of its title. Our analysis provides evidence that journals which publish papers with shorter titles receive more citations per paper. These results are consistent with the intriguing hypothesis that papers with shorter titles may be easier to understand, and hence attract more citations.
Indexed as
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.