Do longer articles gather more citations? Article length and scholarly impact among top biomedical journals

ABSTRACT Publications represent the most tangible products of research and scholarly communication. Growing pressures placed on researchers to increase their publication counts may encourage them to publish shorter papers, so that more publications may be generated from the same project and program....

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology Vol. 55; no. 1; pp. 319 - 326
Main Authors Lyu, Peng‐hui, Wolfram, Dietmar
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published 2018
Subjects
Article length
biomedical journals
citation
publish or perish
scholarly impact
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Summary:ABSTRACT Publications represent the most tangible products of research and scholarly communication. Growing pressures placed on researchers to increase their publication counts may encourage them to publish shorter papers, so that more publications may be generated from the same project and program. Is this the case? Furthermore, do shorter papers garner the same impact as longer papers as measured by the citations received? This research examines the relationship between article length and citations received by articles published in three prominent top biomedical research journals over the lifetime of the journals. The study reveals that instead of getting shorter, articles in these journals are getting longer over time. Longer articles in these journals, on average, attract more citations, and are therefore considered more impactful.
ISSN:2373-9231
2373-9231
DOI:10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501035