Are Papers Asking Questions Cited More Frequently in Computer Science?

In this article, we test the hypothesis that computer science papers asking questions (i.e., those with a question mark at the end of their title) are cited more frequently than those that do not have this property. To this end, we analyze a data set of almost two million records on computer science papers indexed in the Web of Science database and focus our investigation on the mean number of citations per paper of its specific subsets. The main finding is that the average number of citations per paper of the so-called “asking papers” is greater by almost 20% than that of other papers, and that this difference is statistically significant.

[1]  William S. Pearson.  Research article titles in written feedback on English as a second language writing , 2020, Scientometrics.

[2]  Michael Gibbert,et al.  What makes a ‘good’ title and (how) does it matter for citations? A review and general model of article title attributes in management science , 2016, Scientometrics.

[3]  Lutz Bornmann,et al.  Model for Explaining Citations in Scholarly Publications: A Conceptual Overview of the Literature , 2017, J. Informetrics.

[4]  Mark R. Stevens,et al.  Why Do Some Articles in Planning Journals Get Cited More than Others? , 2019, Journal of Planning Education and Research.

[5]  Arif Khan,et al.  The impact of author-selected keywords on citation counts , 2016, J. Informetrics.

[6]  Han Woo Park,et al.  Factors affecting citation networks in science and technology: focused on non-quality factors , 2014, Quality & Quantity.

[7]  Pablo Dorta-González,et al.  Characterizing the highly cited articles: a large-scale bibliometric analysis of the top 1% most cited research , 2018, Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science.

[8]  Vincent Larivière,et al.  On the citation gap of articles naming countries , 2017, ISSI.

[9]  R. Jayawardena,et al.  Determinants of the citation rate of medical research publications from a developing country , 2014, SpringerPlus.

[10]  Michael N. Mavros,et al.  The Impact of Article Length on the Number of Future Citations: A Bibliometric Analysis of General Medicine Journals , 2013, PloS one.

[11]  James M. Cook,et al.  Do scholars follow Betteridge’s Law? The use of questions in journal article titles , 2016, Scientometrics.

[12]  Mohammad Hajizadeh,et al.  The effect of characteristics of title on citation rates of articles , 2013, Scientometrics.

[13]  Klaus Wohlrabe,et al.  Title characteristics and citations in economics , 2016, Scientometrics.

[14]  M. HamidR.Jamali,et al.  Article title type and its relation with the number of downloads and citations , 2011, Scientometrics.

[15]  Adrian Letchford,et al.  The advantage of simple paper abstracts , 2016, J. Informetrics.

[16]  James Hartley,et al.  An academic odyssey: writing over time , 2015, Scientometrics.

[17]  Dalibor Fiala,et al.  Computer Science Papers in Web of Science: A Bibliometric Analysis , 2017, Publ..

[18]  G. Antoniou,et al.  Bibliometric analysis of factors predicting increased citations in the vascular and endovascular literature. , 2015, Annals of vascular surgery.

[19]  Zohreh Zahedi,et al.  On the relationships between bibliographic characteristics of scientific documents and citation and Mendeley readership counts: A large-scale analysis of Web of Science publications , 2017, J. Informetrics.

[20]  Anthony F. J. van Raan,et al.  Non-alphanumeric characters in titles of scientific publications: An analysis of their occurrence and correlation with citation impact , 2011, J. Informetrics.

[21]  C. Whissell.  Titles in Highly Ranked Multidisciplinary Psychology Journals 1966–2011: More Words and Punctuation Marks Allow for the Communication of More Information , 2013, Psychological reports.

[22]  William S. Pearson.  Quoted speech in linguistics research article titles: patterns of use and effects on citations , 2021, Scientometrics.

[23]  Stephen A. Rains,et al.  Titling Practices and Their Implications in Communication Research 1970-2010: Cutesy Cues Carry Citation Consequences , 2019, Communication Research.

[24]  Bhaskar Mukherjee,et al.  Short and amusing: The relationship between title characteristics, downloads, and citations in psychology articles , 2014, J. Inf. Sci..

[25]  Charles W Fox,et al.  The relationship between manuscript title structure and success: editorial decisions and citation performance for an ecological journal , 2015, Ecology and evolution.

[26]  S. Haustein,et al.  Characterizing Social Media Metrics of Scholarly Papers: The Effect of Document Properties and Collaboration Patterns , 2015, PloS one.

[27]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research , 2016, Scientometrics.

[28]  Iman Tahamtan,et al.  Factors affecting number of citations: a comprehensive review of the literature , 2016, Scientometrics.

[29]  Mickaël Coustaty,et al.  Scientometric analysis of social science and science disciplines in a developing nation: a case study of Pakistan in the last decade , 2020, Scientometrics.