The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal

Abstract

A poorly chosen article title may make a paper difficult to discover or discourage readership when discovered, reducing an article's impact. Yet, it is unclear how the structure of a manuscript's title influences readership and impact. We used manuscript tracking data for all manuscripts submitted to the journal Functional Ecology from 2004 to 2013 and citation data for papers published in this journal from 1987 to 2011 to examine how title features changed and whether a manuscript's title structure was predictive of success during the manuscript review process and/or impact (citation) after publication. Titles of manuscripts submitted to Functional Ecology became marginally longer (after controlling for other variables), broader in focus (less frequent inclusion of genus and species names), and included more humor and subtitles over the period of the study. Papers with subtitles were less likely to be rejected by editors both pre- and post-peer review, although both effects were small and the presence of subtitles in published papers was not predictive of citations. Papers with specific names of study organisms in their titles fared poorly during editorial (but not peer) review and, if published, were less well cited than papers whose titles did not include specific names. Papers with intermediate length titles were more successful during editorial review, although the effect was small and title word count was not predictive of citations. No features of titles were predictive of reviewer willingness to review papers or the length of time a paper was in peer review. We conclude that titles have changed in structure over time, but features of title structure have only small or no relationship with success during editorial review and post-publication impact. The title feature that was most predictive of manuscript success: papers whose titles emphasize broader conceptual or comparative issues fare better both pre- and post-publication than do papers with organism-specific titles.

The Length and Semantic Structure of Article Titles—Evolving Disciplinary Practices and Correlations with Impact

“…Anthony (2001) found interrogatory titles to be rare in computer science literature. Fox and Burns (2015) found that although the proportion of submitted articles to the journal Functional Ecology including questions in titles has decreased, the percentage of such articles among the published articles has increased over the 10-year period they had studied. Hudson (2016) found that the titles that include question marks were longer than other titles.…”

“…However, a very large number of studies found the negative relationship in biology (Didegah and Thelwall, 2013), social sciences (Didegah andThelwall, 2013), sociology (van Wesel et al, 2014), and psychology (Subotic and Mukherjee, 2014). Others have found no correlation; e.g., in chemistry (Didegah and Thelwall, 2013), management science (Nair and Gibbert, 2016), ECL (Fox and Burns, 2015), or in articles published in six PLoS journals (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011). Anthony (2001) found that the lengths of titles within computer science literature varied widely, attributing it to different subdisciplines, claiming that "an adequate description depends more on the type of study or problem being investigated than the discipline itself " (p. 193).…”

“…Another study quantified lexical diversity in titles using title phrases rather than individual words (Milojević, 2015) and found that the fields expanded their cognitive extent over time even when normalized for increased productivity. Other studies, (Jacques and Sebire, 2010), all the articles published by Italian researchers that included a country's name in the title (Abramo et al, 2016), and ECL articles that referred to specific names of study organisms in the titles (Fox and Burns, 2015) fared poorly in terms of impact, or in the case of ECL even in terms of being accepted for publication. Although amusing titles might be perceived as a good strategy to boost attention, studies have shown that they either did not have any citation advantage (Sagi and Yechiam, 2008;Subotic and Mukherjee, 2014).…”

Effect of Topical Administration of Fractions and Isolated Molecules from Plant Extracts on Skin Wound Healing: A Systematic Review of Murine Experimental Models

“…This guide also brings items that help to understand the quality of the writing and potential methodological bias that compromise the quality of the evidence [15]. The work title should refer the readers to a brief summary of the article content, providing keywords and terms that could be researched in electronic databases [73]. Only 78.12% of the studies presented a coherent title, while 90.6% presented abstracts with clear information relative to the objectives, methods, main results, and conclusions.…”

Scientometrics of Forest Health and Tree Diseases: An Overview

“…Even though more and more attention is given to scientometric issues such as the impact factor of journals and the h-index of researchers, often these metrics have limited predictive, comparative and explanatory power [79][80][81][82][83]. However, despite the increasing popularity of scientometric approaches over the last years across the spectrum of scientific fields, there has been relatively little use of such tools in forest pathology.…”