The advantage of simple paper abstracts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2015.11.001Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • We investigate whether or not the style of a scientific paper's abstract bears any relation to the number of times that paper is cited.

  • We find that papers whose abstracts contain more frequently used words tend to receive slightly more citations.

  • We find that journals which publish papers whose abstracts are shorter and contain more frequently used words receive slightly more citations per paper.

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

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