Abstract How can the title of a paper affect its subsequent number of citations? We compared the citation rate of 5941 papers published in the journal Biological Conservation from 1968 to 2012 in relation to: paper length; title length; number of authors; paper age; presence of punctuation (colons, commas or question marks); geographic and taxonomic breadth; the word ‘method’; and the type of manuscript (article, review). The total number of citations increased in more recently published papers and thus we corrected citation rate (average number of citations per year since publication) by publication age. As expected, review papers had, on average, twice the number of citations compared to other types of articles. Papers with the greatest geographic or taxonomic breadth were cited up to twice as frequently as narrowly focused papers. Titles phrased as questions, shorter titles, and papers with more authors had slightly higher numbers of citations. However, overall, we found that the included parameters explained only 12% of the variability in citation rate. This suggests that finding a good title is necessary, but that other factors are more important to construct a well-cited paper. We suggest that to become highly cited, a primary requirement is that papers need to advance the science significantly and be useful to readers.

中文翻译：

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杀人蜂适合喝咖啡吗？论文标题和其他因素对其未来引用的贡献

摘要 一篇论文的标题如何影响其后续的引用次数？我们比较了 1968 年至 2012 年在 Biological Conservation 杂志上发表的 5941 篇论文的引用率，这些论文涉及：论文长度；标题长度；作者人数；纸时代；标点符号的存在（冒号、逗号或问号）；地理和分类广度；“方法”这个词；和手稿的类型（文章、评论）。最近发表的论文的引用总数有所增加，因此我们按发表年龄校正了引用率（自发表以来每年的平均引用次数）。正如预期的那样，与其他类型的文章相比，评论论文的平均引用次数是其两倍。具有最大地理或分类学广度的论文被引用的频率是狭窄论文的两倍。以问题形式表达的标题、较短的标题和作者较多的论文的引用次数略高。然而，总的来说，我们发现所包含的参数仅解释了 12% 的引用率变化。这表明找到一个好的标题是必要的，但其他因素对于构建一篇被广泛引用的论文更为重要。我们建议，要成为高被引率，首要要求是论文需要显着推动科学进步并对读者有用。