Scientists proved the less is more phenomenon to be true, in a study that compared citations of lengthier-titled scientific reports with shorter-titled ones.
The paper is titled The Advantage of Short Paper Titles.
In this study published online on Aug. 26 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers from the Warwick Business School in Britain went through around 140,000 papers that had titles between one and 55 words, and looked at the most cited reports from 2007 to 2013.
They found that the shorter the title of a paper was, the more times it was cited by fellow scientists.
"In 2011, each character added onto a paper's title had a tendency to reduce the number of citations by approximately 1.78 percent," said data scientist Adrian Letchford, who is also the lead author of the study.
In two studies published in 2010 in the journal Science, for example, the researchers found that the paper titled The Role of Particle Morphology in Interfacial Energy Transfer in CDSE/CDS Heterostructure Nanocrystals to be cited 68 times, while A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome was cited 700 times.
There were, however, exceptions to the 'shorter is better' rule. Despite shorter paper titles, reports published in medical journals like the Journal of High Energy Physics accumulated fewer citations. Papers with lengthier titles published in The Lancet and The Lancet Oncology were found to have high citation numbers despite the longer titles.
While shorter paper titles are easier to read and understand, Letchford also considered other factors like high-impact journals that attract higher citation numbers and may also strictly restrict the lengths of titles. He also noted that studies that tackle incremental advances usually generate longer titles in, as he calls it, "less prestigious" journals, acquiring less citations.
As for their published findings, Letchford said he and his colleagues were also thinking about giving it the title Paper Titles or just Titles, but they wouldn't have given their readers an idea of what the study is about.
"This really doesn't help anyone to understand what the paper is about. A paper might be better off with a title that is short as well as informative."
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