Data from: The advantage of short paper titles

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.每年均有海量学术论文发表，其中部分受到广泛关注，另有部分则几乎无人问津。本文旨在探究该影响力差异是否可通过论文呈现形式的一项简单量化指标——标题长度——予以解释。本研究分析表明，刊载标题较短论文的期刊，其单篇论文平均被引次数更高。上述结果与一项耐人寻味的假说相符：标题较短的论文更易于理解，因而能获得更多引用。