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Papers With Shorter Titles Get More Citations, Study Suggests
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A new study suggests that you may be able to predict the popularity of a scientific paper from the length of its title. Brevity, it turns out, appears to earn a paper a little more attention.
Articles with shorter titles tend to get cited more often than those with longer headers, according to "The Advantage of Short Paper Titles," a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The study examined 140,000 papers published between 2007 and 2013.
"My working theory is that perhaps shorter paper titles are easier to read and easier to understand," thus attracting wider audiences and increasing the likelihood of a citation, says lead author Adrian Letchford, a data scientist at the University of Warwick in Coventry, U.K. But there may be other explanations, he adds.
From Science
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