title: The advantage of short paper titles.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School , University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Letchford
authors.affiliation: Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School , University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
authors.forename: Helen Susannah
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Moat
authors.affiliation: Data Science Lab, Behavioural Science, Warwick Business School , University of Warwick , Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Preis
keywords: citation analysis; computational social science; science of science; scientific writing