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Scholars love short headlines

05.09.2015

High citation is considered a sign of the success of a scientific work: the more other researchers have referred to the article, the more interesting and promising its results. But in a publication, not only the content is important, but also the form: it is unlikely that anyone will read a very badly written text - they simply cannot, even if a discovery of incredible importance is described there. What formal, stylistic parameters influence the popularity of the study?

For example, title length. Adrian Letchford and colleagues at the University of Warwick compared the citations of 140 articles published between 000 and 2007 with the length of their titles. This is not the first work of its kind, but so far the results here have been somewhat contradictory. Some of the controversy may have arisen because different scientific journals use different standards. For example, Science requires authors to limit the title of an article to 2013 characters, while journals in the PLoS (Public Library of Science) group allow up to 90 characters - however, in terms of citation rate, articles in Science, on average, are far ahead of articles in PLoS. That is, in order to study the relationship between the popularity of a work and its title, one must compare publications published in the same journal or publishing group.

This time, the researchers did just that, with a somewhat predictable result: citations were higher for papers with short titles. There were exceptions, though: papers in The Lancet and The Lancet Oncology failed to find a relationship between title length and popularity, and in the Journal of High Energy Physics, publications with short titles tended to garner few self-citations. (By the way, The Lancet found two articles that were in the top five shortest titles: one of them was simply called "Myopia", that is, "Myopia", and the second - "Measles", that is, "Measles".) Fully about the results research can be read at the Royal Society Open Science.

Employees at some publications - Karl Ziemelis, science editor of the physics department at Nature, and Meghan Byrne, senior editor at PLoS One - say that this is true: a short headline attracts more attention, so it increases the likelihood that the article under it will be read to the end. Huge statistics from 140 thousand analyzed publications speak in favor of the new work, however, of course, no one says that a short title is the only key to success. This, rather, is only one of the factors, especially since, for example, the scientific profile of the article and the name of the head of the laboratory were not taken into account here.

It may well be that physicists and doctors have different attitudes towards the length of headlines, and an article published by the staff of a Nobel laureate will, by definition, attract increased attention. However, the results obtained should not be dismissed. After all, scientists love taciturnity not at all out of laziness of the mind, they simply, like no one else, understand the validity of Shakespeare's well-known expression "... brevity is the soul of the mind ...", which is akin to Chekhov's no less famous "brevity is the sister of talent."

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