Guest blog post by Jürgen Dengler
“What makes a paper successful?” is something authors would like to know when submitting a manuscript and editors when deciding on the acceptance of papers.
One answer is: “Write an exciting paper on a relevant topic with up-to-date methods”.
While this is certainly true, most authors feel that this is not the whole truth. The enormous efforts some authors invest in getting their paper accepted in a “high-rank” journal reflect the belief that the publication venue influences the scientific impact of a paper. Other authors spend quite some time in finding a “fancy” title for their contribution.
But do such “formal” aspects actually influence the impact of articles and, if so, to which degree and which are the most relevant ones?
Astonishingly, there is very little published evidence on these aspects.
Thus, I conducted an empirical study using my own publication output over the years. With almost 200 papers in over 50 indexed journals, it already allows some generalisations. With the three IAVS journals, Journal of Vegetation Science, Applied Vegetation Science and Vegetation Classification and Survey, being among the preferred outlets, the journal portfolio is probably also quite similar to that of other IAVS members.
As a common currency for citation impact, I used the Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI), provided by the Scopus database. While the absolute number of citations is not suitable for a meaningful comparison between papers as the number of citations always increases with time since publication, FWCI standardised citations compared to all articles published in the same year in the same subject field and as the same article type (e.g. research article vs. review article).
A FWCI of 1 means that an article is cited as much as the average, a FWCI of 2 refers to twice as many citations as an average article, etc. Scopus also provides a corresponding measure to FWCI at the journal level, namely the Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), which essentially is the mean of the FWCI values of all papers in that journal in the respective period.
According to the multiple regression analysis, journal impact (SNIP) was the strongest predictor of the article impact.
However, alone it explained only 26.8% of the variance while other formal parameters together explained 31.5% of the variance.
Among those, the brevity of the title was most influential. Each word less in the title led to 9% more citations.
Further, both article length and author number had a positive influence on citations.
Publishing in a special feature increased the citation rate by 43%.
By contrast, open access or formulating titles as questions or factual statements did not significantly influence citation rates.
In conclusion, selecting a high-impact journal has less influence on the article impact than many people believe – the citation impact of different articles in one journal typically varies more than the mean citation impact between different journals.
For authors, the easiest way to increase the impact of a given article is to shorten the title as much as possible.
Associated journal article:
Dengler J (2024) Determinants of citation impact. Vegetation Classification and Survey 5: 169-177. https://doi.org/10.3897/VCS.126956.
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Originally published on the Vegetation Science Blog: Official blog post of the IAVS journals.
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