Over the Summer of 2019, two studies were published investigating commonalities in highly cited papers. If you've ever wondered how to give your article a boost and attract more readers - read on - this post will summarise the findings.
Of course, there is no magic formula or quick-and-easy route to guarantee a highly cited paper. Ultimately, a paper is cited as a result of its content contributing something new or significant to a field of research. However, as the rate of publishing scientists and academic publications rises each year, the struggle is real for the early career researcher seeking to simply get their work read!
The insights from Mohamed Elgendi (The University of British Colombia) and Nicholas Fraser (ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics) et al make for interesting reading.
Of course, there is no magic formula or quick-and-easy route to guarantee a highly cited paper. Ultimately, a paper is cited as a result of its content contributing something new or significant to a field of research. However, as the rate of publishing scientists and academic publications rises each year, the struggle is real for the early career researcher seeking to simply get their work read!
The insights from Mohamed Elgendi (The University of British Colombia) and Nicholas Fraser (ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics) et al make for interesting reading.
 |
| Picture from Pixabay.com under Pixabay License |
5 features of a highly cited article
Elgendi analysed 100 highly cited and 100 lowly cited articles from 202 open-access journals across a range of disciplines. In addition, he analyzed the top 100 articles published in Nature in 2014 (according to Google Scholar), the top 100 articles indexed by the Web of Science in 2014, and the top 100 articles in Altmetric in 2018.
His findings summarised below indicate 5 features of a highly cited article -
- A title of 7-13 words.
- Common words used in the title, which words?
- MDPI: Review, cancer, monitoring, recent, and therapeutic
- Google Scholar: Method, theory, analysis, applications, and learning.
- Web of Science: Method, protein, DNA, multiple, and new.
- Altmetrics: Association, analysis, cancer, health, and study.
- Six authors or more.
- 35,000 characters (discounting spaces) as a minimum.
- Approximately 5,600 words.
- Six figures and two tables as a minimum.
Elgendi acknowledges that the above does not guarantee increased citation rates, and essential features that improve citation rates and overall impact include the journal’s reputation, the originality of the work, the importance of the topic, the authors’ fame, the journal accessibility (open access versus non-open access) and the publication type (article, review, communication).
Elgedi's paper is published in IEEEAccess.
 |
| Picture from Pixabay.com under Pixabay License |
Preprints boost article citations and mentions
Posting an early version of a journal article to a preprint server, such as bioRxiv and others, is generally recognised as a means to fast-track the publishing process by getting scientific findings out there quickly. Fraser et al analysed 7,087 papers with preprints and the same number of papers without, using data from Scopus and Altmetrics to compare citations and online sharing activity.
They found that journal articles uploaded as preprints before being published gathered just under 7 citations per paper on average, compared to just over 4 citations for journal articles without preprints over the same period.
The trend continued after the publication of the journal article, as publications with associated preprints were mentioned more frequently in blogs, news articles and Wikipedia pages than articles without a preprint.
Fraser et al's paper is available in bioRxiv.
 |
| Picture from Pixabay.com under Pixabay License |
It's worth saying again that there are no fast tracks to high citations, and citations alone will not indicate quality research, but combine a shared preprint with the features included in Elgendi's study and you may find more attention coming your paper's way.