The advantage of simple paper abstracts

Adrian Letchford, Tobias Preis and Helen Susannah Moat

Journal of Informetrics, 2016, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Each year, researchers publish an immense number of scientific papers. While some receive many citations, others receive none. Here we investigate whether any of this variance can be explained by the choice of words in a paper's abstract. We find that doubling the word frequency of an average abstract increases citations by 0.70%. We also find that journals which publish papers whose abstracts are shorter and contain more frequently used words receive slightly more citations per paper. Specifically, adding a 5 letter word to an abstract decreases the number of citations by 0.02%. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the style in which a paper's abstract is written bears some relation to its scientific impact.

Keywords: Citation analysis; Scientific writing; Computational social science; Science of science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157715300766
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:infome:v:10:y:2016:i:1:p:1-8

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2015.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Informetrics is currently edited by Leo Egghe

More articles in Journal of Informetrics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().